Kurt Kren Trailers
Becoming Otto TrailerBirth of a Nation TrailerHomage to Kurt Kren Trailer
Kurt Kren was born in 1929 in Vienna, Austria from a Jewish father and a German mother. From 1939 till the end of World War II, Kren lived in Rotterdam, where he was sent to with one of the Children's Transports. In 1947 Kren returned to Vienna, and his father provided him a job at the National Bank.
He began making films in 1957. 2/60 48 Köpfe Aus Dem Szondi -Test (1960) was his first serial film and 3/60 Bäume Im Herbst (1960) confirmed this structural orientation. He realized in the 1960s his most famous films with the Viennese actionists, where his skill of short film blossomed. In 1966, he took part in the « Destruction in Art Symposium » organized by Metzger in London. In 1968 he visited the USA for the first time, showing his films in New York and St. Louis. This very year he became a founder of the Austria Filmmakers Cooperative. After a participation in a happening "Kunst und Revolution" ("Art and Revolution") at the University of Vienna in 1968, Kren's films were confiscated and he was fired from the National Bank. He participated in 1970 in the International Underground Film Festival (London) and in 1971, in the Cannes Film Festival. He then moved to Cologne for five years. Retrospectives were set up by the London National Film Theatre in 1976 and the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1979. He was also involved in the Dokumenta 6 of Kassel in 1977.
From 1978 to 1989, Kren lived in the USA and presented lectures for universities and schools. He did many jobs such as security officer in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Within this period he made his bad home movies as he used to call them inspired by his travels across the country. He finally returned to his native Vienna in 1990. He died from pneumonia in Vienna in 1998.
Most Popular Kurt Kren Trailers
Total trailers found: 64
01 January 1985
Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.
01 June 2010
A portrait of the Austrian avant-garde artist Otto Mühl/Muehl (1925-2013), whose work combined sex, violence, gastronomy and bodily effluence with unbridled abandon.
20 June 1967
Kren frames the image to suggest a proscenium, with a view to the harbor that conveys a literal sense of “tele-vision”.
19 March 1969
A report about an Underground Festival on tour through Germany and Switzerland.
01 January 1978
At the center are takes which do not change - a tree in a field in Vermont, U.S.A. Since the film was shot over a period of fifty days, the single frame shots create a storm of pictures.
19 September 1970
"This film is an attempt in focusing. I visited Kurt Kren in Vienna. (Kurt Kren is considered to be the father of the European underground film.
01 January 1967
Sinus Beta is almost a sort of teaching film about bodily behavior in different situations. The film also produces, through the heterogenic photographic materiality of the primary elements, a cross-section of the methods, used in capturing the body in a still photograph.
31 December 1971
A subversive and experimental film by Otto Muehl.
01 April 1968
Four men, one woman and a cat in a room. The men drink and discuss. Things get a bit violent. The masochist acts out his desires by himself.
01 October 1964
In the first action he filmed, 6/64 Mama und Papa, Kren’s editing leads to many interlocking continuous shots; central takes recur like a leitmotif, circular motion and networking can be observed throughout the film.
03 September 1971
Kurt Kren short
23 November 1968
A short film by Kurt Kren.
01 April 1965
Kren’s 10/65 Selfmutilation is developed from a Gunter Brus “action”. What the film emphasizes is the surrealistic drama of symbolic self-destruction that Kren drew out of Brus’ action, pacing out each gesture so that one gets a tense, iconoclastic revelation of a man covered in white plaster lying surrounded by razor blades and a range of instruments looking as if they have been taken from an operating theatre.
01 January 1967
A collage of many visuals. A man urinates; a man has a drink. A man defecates; someone eats a meal. 16/67 September 20: ‘The Eating Drinking Shitting Pissing Film'.
01 January 1985
"It became easier to understand Kren's method of approaching film when he illustrated his matter-of-factness with a story: he was asked to shoot and deliver a film, for a festival, given four day's notice, which he did ('foot'-age shoot'-out').
01 January 1968
An experimental, bizarre and a very different shooting of an association between the sexes.
01 November 1964
Based on a Muehl Happening. The almost convulsive use of juxtaposition reappears here, but the captured gesture assumes a more erotic sensitivity, though the "action" itself was primarily a gradual destruction of the erotic.
01 January 1956
A silent short film by Kurt Kren.
03 September 1973
Kren shows the cinema (mentioned in the title) during and after film presentations. He uses single-frame and time exposures 5 to 30 seconds long.
03 September 1977
Kurt Kren short
01 October 1969
Another try by the Viennese actionists around Otto Mühl, trying to shock the middle-class bourgeoisie with all sorts of explicit sexual and excretory processes.
01 January 1997
A homage to the Austrian experimental filmmaker Kurt Kren, his two films "1000 Years of Cinema" and "Snapspots" and his way of working; and that with a slight wink.
01 January 1965
11/65 Bild Helga Philipp is an optical abstraction of an optical abstraction: Kren has simply intercut filmed movements and sections from an Op painting by Helga Philipp - the result is motion opticals.
03 September 1982
The third of the "bad home movies". Kren moved, along with his Thunderbird from New England in winter to the warmth of Texas.
01 January 1991
A commission by Austrian TV station ORF documenting the anniversary celebration for Kunststücke.
11 September 1973
A man's head is seen in silent close-up using single-frame shooting and time exposure.
03 September 1981
Kren on his way from Vermont to California. Kren says that his various cars are the thread which runs through the story.
01 January 1956
Vacation pictures from Rome.
01 January 1993
On the 28th of October 1884 Daniel Paul Schreber, candidate of the National Liberal Party in Chemnitz, suffered a heavy defeat at the elections of the German Reichstag.
23 November 1968
Kren filmed, in microscopic detail the reflection and refraction of the light in/on a glass bottle. However, the bottle itself (the whole body) is never seen.
03 September 1990
Kurt Kren short
16 September 1970
Kurt Kren films an anti-war poster in extreme close-up moves to subvert the quick responses of viewers to its loaded imagery.
01 January 1956
A "stroll" at various locations: the St. Marx Cemetery, the Prater park, Carnuntum. We see people taking walks, construction workers, people flying model planes and other little observations.
01 January 1961
The film uses slides - photographic planes - which show different surfaces and finishes of a wall, which have been erroded by time.
01 January 1978
Hans-Peter Hochenrath and Birgit Hein made a documentary film about me for the Saarland Network and wanted me to make a self-portrait.
01 January 1976
I took a photograph of the view out of the window and had a very large negative made from it, which I fastened to the lens hood attacement in front of the camera.
03 September 1996
Kurt Kren records snapshots of visitors to Vienna who are photographed in front of the statue of Johann Strauss Jr.
11 September 1973
In a TV film about the film Casablanca, Kren is meant to read aloud three letters that Groucho Marx wrote to Warner Bros.
08 March 1969
Kurt Kren filmed pieces of feature films in the cinema without looking through the viewfinder. The missing sexual climax from the cinema was added by Kren in the form of insights and views from Otto Muehl's Libi Aktion.
03 September 1984
Kurt Kren recorded the last television debate in the Reagan/Mondale election campaign. In the viewfinder, the television filled the entire picture, but the viewfinder did not match the lens entirely so that the television screen in the picture was very little.
01 January 1995
The making of pictures becomes the central issue in itself in that, with an analytical single-picture procedure, picture-taking tourists on Vienna's St.
01 March 1957
Mostly dark, rejecting images which are repeated. A stone wall, the chamber of a revolver which is, at first not recognizable, a close-up of a cactus.
01 October 1960
The first embodiment of (a) concept of structural activity in cinema comes in Kren's Bäume im Herbst, where the camera as a subjective observer is constrained within a systematic or structural procedure, incidentally the precursors of the most structuralist aspect of Michael Snow's later work.
01 January 1964
In 9/64 O Christmas Tree Kren offers a more visually descriptive development of a Muehl "action". The images have been chosen to follow a more dramatic sequence, probably because the action itself contained a wide range of images and materials.
06 August 1997
Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996.
25 October 1997
An eccentric homage to the Rainer Werner Fassbinder days of German filmmaking.
01 January 2001
A collection of shorts by Kurt Kren. Some are based on performaces by Viennese Actionists such as Günter Brus and Otto Mühl.
01 January 1957
Marc Adrian´s FILMBLOCK 0 paces out the foundations of a ritual of self-realization. With its matte surfaces (colorful leader) and easily visible splices – before the production of a negative, the film fell apart at the taped places with every presentation – Black Movie I stands at the beginning of this development, while Black Movie II with its gleaming, painstakingly made colors and sparklingly clean “cuts” marks the conclusion.
01 May 1960
Kren's second film and the first he cut according to a strictly serial, sequence technique: in various frame sizes, the 48 portraits from the Szondi Test for "experimental diagnosis of human impulses" are shown in pre-specified lengths (between one and eight frames).
01 January 1971
Zeichenfilm - Balzac oder das Auge Gottes is a play on the idea of trick film. And trick film it is. The 30-second work is shown twice in case the viewer missed something the first time: in crude hand-drawn animation Zeichenfilm .
01 October 1979
'It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife.
01 May 1962
Almost as if entering the picture frame by chance, mute characters lean out of Viennese apartment windows, simply to have a look.
01 January 1980
A guy having sex with a woman on a rooftop – just to get her coffee-machine.
01 January 1965
"Action" by Günter Brus. At first Kren did not want to show the film, because the image is underexposed.
03 September 1981
Kren in New Hampshire, New England. Together with friends he lived from the demolition of wooden houses and sale of the wood.
01 January 1968
Kurt Kren films a photo which shows an SS officer standing on a town square which is littered with dead bodies.
01 January 1975
A meadow, a lake, the silhouette of a hill, trees. 21 days of the same view in Saarland. 21 days with five different cut-outs in a mask before the camera, which finally reveals a complete panorama.
01 January 1965
A kind of home movie made in Brus' apartment. Brus' Christmas wishes can be seen on a poster which he painted and which he holds for a short time in front of the camera.
01 June 1966
Kren’s last film to include any direct reference to Otto Muehl is 12/66: Cosinus Alpha, a 10-minute film that completes a cycle of elaborate sensual montages and materials.
