sixpackfilm

The Life of Sean DeLear is a vibrantly multi-faceted, buoyantly propulsive documentary portrait of this irresistibly charismatic one-off — sketched in celebratory but commendably clear-eyed style by writer-director Markus Zizenbacher. There can be very few people better qualified to do justice to this particular tale. Zizenbacher befriended DeLear — born Anthony Robertson in Simi Valley, an obscure California backwater — after the latter relocated to Vienna in the early 2010s.

Every encounter with an image, every interaction searches for its own form. She is the other gaze is a collaboration with five female visual artists of an older generation who have been part of the Viennese art scene since the 1970s and engaged in the women's movement. In dialogue with the filmmaker Renate Bertlmann, Linda Christanell, Lore Heuermann, Karin Mack and Margot Pilz share their early works and artistic practices. They remember how their self-determination evolved between artistic ambitions, economic constraints, adaptation and resistance to the prevailing patriarchal social structures. In their role as feminist pioneers, the protagonists are a great influence on the contemporary art scene and the self-understanding of younger artists today. With their voices and narratives, they become collaborators passing on feminist thinking and artistic experiences.

In the darkroom, 50 unexposed film strips were laid across a surface, upon which a frame of "La sortie des ouvrier de l'usine Lumière" was projected. The stringing together of the individual developed sections make up the new film, which reads the original frame like a page from a musical score: within the strips from top to bottom and sequentially from left to right.

A young woman move towards a house that holds a potentially dangerous spirit that has been tormenting her. The woman tries to fight against the film itself as it starts to cause the world to collapse.

A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.

Bergmanesque ghosts appear at the bedside of Edward Weki, a 75-year-old Sudanese man suffering from the final stage of Parkinson’s: Alma, the nurse of Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, and a female version of Death from his The Seventh Seal help the old man recover lost memories of his life on the island of Farö.

The first of Peter Tscherkassky's Cinemascope trilogy of short films is a fragmented glimpse of images pulsating with chaotic rhythm as they fight white margins for room in his palette. Mirrored frames being split by white margin and trying to reassemble again like the poles of a magnet, a train approaching station and colliding with itself in white-hot blistering chaos.

FUDDY DUDDY uses the motif of the grid to blow it to pieces. Being occupied with structural film, I repeatedly draw 'frame plans', using grid structures to precisely record the succession of individual images. To me, this sometimes seems like a search for structures in an apparently chaotic world. The medium of film fulfils the need for orientation. (Siegfried A. Fruhauf)

The film "Into the Emptiness" describes an example of the ritual game of "serfdom" in a "studio for bizarre eroticism". This game comprises a masochistic phantasy in which theguest assumes the role of an obedient slave and servant while the woman employed by the "studio" plays a domina who rules and punishes without mercy.

Billy Roisz taps into our sensual pleasures with this experimental interpretation of Hieronymus Bosch’s iconic triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. The largely abstract landscape, stemming from both analogue equipment and ‘deep dreaming’ – a generative AI technique based on neural networks – ranges from paradisiacal to hellish. Combined with the chirping, ticking and pounding soundtrack, in which field recordings have also been incorporated, the temptation is almost impossible to resist.

Hans Scheugl could have started a new life with his friend John in the USA 50 years ago - but he didn't. He imagines a life that never happened. The letter A, blurred against a pink background. This is the first letter on a journey that does not go alphabetically to Z, even though many letters appear - not just alphabetical, but written correspondence.

A man rescues a boy and later tries to get him off his back but to little avail, so they end up drifting around a subterranean world, populated by grotesque masked figures. A hundred years after Chaplin filmed his first feature film, The Kid, Norbert Pfaffenbichler offers an experimental punk-style interpretation, which the filmmaker himself has defined as a dystopian slapstick film.

Somalia. A policewoman sits in her parked car. After a while, she gets out, puts on her service cap, and enters the prison. There, decisive hours have dawned for young Farah. Organizational machinery starts up around him. Farah is examined by a doctor, instructed by the bailiff, and looked after by an imam. Farah is waiting for his parents to visit. “How are you?” is the question everyone asks him that day. Each time, “Good” is his concise answer. Only when the policewoman takes Farah out of town the next morning does the unspeakable become a painful reality.

Inside a museum, nowadays. A diorama represents two young soldiers in the trenches. All of a sudden, we are thrown into the diorama: the immobile soldiers come to life, there is terror on their faces – the camera dances around them – explosions, chaos, fog: everything flies about in the air. With every gunshot, they shudder and curl up

Elena Wolff submerges into the turbulent world of the young, up-and-coming art scene of Linz. In a series of episodes, Asche tells of three couples and an outsider, of alpha males and muses, of loneliness, and the urge for self-realization. In doing so, this pop satire of the art world exercises a high-volume criticism of both patriarchy and the cultural scene—including unexpected vendettas and bizarre encounters.

Vasof demonstrates her unbelievable pleasure in experimentation and simultaneously shares her delight in demonstrating the illusion enabled solely through the medium of cinema. She proceeds similarly in four vivid, separetly titled demonstrative procedures, when everyday objects are turned into mechanical constructions. In the end, reality is back again.

Salton Sea was the largest inland lake in California. It was also an atomic bomb test zone.

Anton and Franz live together since the beginnings of 20th century. They talk about their difficulties of being vampires, since their first bite in 1938. Their inconsistent arguments recall those of normal human beings. And history repeat itself. As if that were not enough, they also doesn`t really like each other much.

We accompany the 90-year-old filmmaker Alexander Hammid on a stroll through New York, wandering with him through the outer and inner landscapes of his world. The observation of details takes on a meditative character.