sixpackfilm

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this wondrously captivating experiment, Albert Sackl creates a quasi-stereoscopic effect by moving a Bolex camera on a rail from left to right, continuously capturing two frames on each side. The way in which these come together in a small perspectival point makes gestures seem to quiver, bodies tremble, and buildings shake. Silently, not only the two different angles but also the individuals in the frame find their way towards each other.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Experimental filmmaker Selma Doborac presents a radical and uncompromising essay on the impossibility of depicting the atrocities of war through insightful subtitles and meditative footage of abandoned structures that belong to the present as well as to the past.

A few hours in the life of empress Sisi; a summer night at Gödöllö. A game with operetta and melodrama; a grotesque with much colour, music, dancing, and bloodshed.

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.

Broadcast on the Austrian Television (ORF) in June 1972, TV & VT-Works comprises a series of ‘tele-actions’ in which a cigar-smoking newsreader is periodically interrupted by public interventions raising the question “Is this Art?”. Disrupting the smooth flow of information and thus the illusion of comprehending the world from one’s living room, these actions interrogate TV temporality to examine the mechanisms of production and spectatorship. A work of culture jamming avant la lettre.

Landscape and cinema form an amalgam here, being both interior spaces of thought and feeling and projected images of an outside.

It hisses, it blinks. A virtual, two-dimensional anaglyph flickers in red and green, unfolding a visual space true to the Brehmian aesthetic. Concentratedly condensed collisions occur between everyday life and the world, being and performing, symbols and icons. A human skull, human bodies, Castle Grafenegg as an architectonic stand-in for the uncanny ... Sex and crime, art and pop culture flicker at pixilated speed – the stuff of dreams – most penetrating however brief. The mundane alternates with the fetish, glimpsed in the blink of an eye, intersected by a long drag on a Chesterfield cigarette while the full-bodied, tube-amped slow-motion reverb sound of a guitar swings in the background.

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.

A harmonious, liberated image of sexuality emerges from the hips, breasts, thighs and arms, sometimes blurred, sometimes glistening with liquid running over the skin, and the exciting forms that open up between them. This is what making love with, in front of, and behind the camera could look like. What’s more, the camera and its image begin to dissolve with the bodies and merge into abstract forms that inspire imaginations. It’s a bit like staring into a lava lamp and suddenly realizing that you yourself are the lava.