About the Viennese Episode of WELT SPIEGEL KINO
Michael Loebenstein, Österreichisches Filmmuseum
“The Austrian Film Museum is a cinémathèque. Our exhibitions take place on the screen” reads a sign in the foyer of a museum, which presents no exhibits other than a few posters. Gustav Deutsch quoted this sentence repeatedly in the framework of his lectures; previously, I was not aware of the extent of its double meaning. Yet, it contains those two instances that represent the significant poles of modern concepts of history and contemporary film archiving practice: the presentation, of and by which preservation and canonization occur and are forged; and disappearance, the transience of civilized artifacts in the flow of time.
“History happens.” The film theorist Vivian Sobchack uses this statement in the preface of her book, which, playing on the phenomenon of the persistence of vision in its title, explores the relationship between audiovisual media and historical memory . According to Sobchack, the great achievement of cinema comprises its ability to make the past present in the act of (cinematic) presentation; to create a tactile present there, where everything actually bears witness to loss. She considers this persistence of the cinema to be a liberating potential—via the cinematic apparatus, the cinema-goers, modern (western) masses, discover and invent themselves as active and reacting historical subjects.
“Film is.” is Gustav Deutsch’s no less succinct title. As a materialist, the artist nearly “inevitably” arrived at the archive: there is a very good reason why Ken Jacob’s readymade “Perfect Film” is one of his favorite films. A Deutschfilm (and WELT SPIEGEL KINO in particular) takes its impetus directly from the testimonial character of found footage and then uses avant-garde means (slow motion, repeating loops, superimposition, and structural re-montages) to liberate its virtual potential. In this the individual artifact thus experiences, for one, the marking as special (in every piece of film, as marginal as it is, the entirety of cinema is constructed); and also, the individual film strips become the starting point for a number of possible connections. Like the hyperlinks in Deutsch/Schimek’s interactive CD-Rom “ODYSEE TODAY,” every presence in the picture refers to contexts beyond the frame: structural patterns, homologies, continuities and ruptures, mental history(ies).
In the Viennese episode of WELT SPIEGEL KINO, a cinema in the suburb of Erdberg becomes the hub of the universe. Characteristically, the Kinematograf Theater, eternalized by its proud owner on nitro-cellulose, was also known in the course of the 1910s as Austriakino; at the crossing of two of Vienna’s traffic arteries the Austria of the (waning) monarchy understood itself as that center of gravity that world history writhes around. The cinema (also) tells history as the registration of dominance in the entertainment apparatus: the aged emperor on an “inspection journey,” in the midst of his subjects; a mustachioed passerby—whom the montage, like a time machine, transports to the battle of Isonzo in 1917—turns like a mechanical toy in front of the camera and throws up his right arm in a brisk salute. The film constantly intervenes in the street scene, halts the flow of time, selects faces, poses, and characters to sketch a picture of Vienna as “Vienna” of the contemporary urban culture of distraction. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin wrote that the masses absorb the artwork. They grasp (in both senses of the term) the moving picture in a way similar to the way they grasp the architecture of the city, as a tactile sensation. In the use of the cinema by the “infamous people,” justice is done to the Vienna of the “little people,” the workers and employees, nannies and suburban boys (whose “moral drainage” by the cinema the Viennese district court had already complained of before World War I). In the way they made the boulevards and squares, the amusement miles of the “Prater,” the venue for their social presence at the dawn of historical modernity, they once again populate the public realm in Gustav Deutsch’s cinema. Our exhibitions take place on the screen: WELT SPIEGEL KINO gives us an impression of cinema as an area of deployment, as an escapist point of departure, and as a world fair.
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(1) Vivian Sobchack: "Introduction: History Happens" in: Sobchack (ed.): The Persistence of History. Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. New York, London 1996, p. 3 ff.