Monument Film

Double 35mm screening and cine-lecture 

From his earliest film, Kubelka recognised that cinema could be so much more than a medium for telling stories, and he has been one of the most tireless advocates of film as an art form. His new work Antiphon (2012) will screen with the legendary Arnulf Rainer (1960) in an expanded projection event Monument Film.

Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka has been a vital and uncompromising force in cinema for more than half a century. In a body of work that lasts not much more than an hour in total, he condenses and articulates the essential qualities of analogue cinema, distinguishing film as an autonomous artform. His 1960 film Arnulf Rainer, composed only of the purest elements of light and darkness, sound and silence, remains one of the most radical achievements in film history. In response to that earlier work, his new film Antiphon was revealed in 2012 as part of Monument Film, a powerful testament to the entire medium. With two 35mm projectors situated in the auditorium, each film is screened individually, then combined as double projections, both side-by-side and superimposed upon each other.

Throughout this extraordinary projection event, Peter Kubelka will discuss his theories, explaining the differences between film and digital media, and articulating his belief in the survival of cinema.

Monument Film is a response to what Kubelka describes as the ‘hostile takeover’ of analogue cinema technology by digital media, and hence might be best understood as a ‘last call to dogged resistance’. Both works explore the four cinematographic elements – light and darkness, sound and silence – effectively stripping cinema down to its bare essentials.

Antiphon is constituted by the same 4 basic elements of cinema, light and darkness, sound and silence, as is my film Arnulf Rainer but it has the opposite form. Negative becomes positive, positive becomes negative, silence becomes sound, sound becomes silence. Six minutes 24 seconds, black and white, optical sound, 35 millimeter film. (Peter Kubelka)