Recap of GME Streamline's Presentation of the Complete INDEX Edition Collection Now Available as DVD/DSL Bundles Featuring New Releases by Maria Lassnig & Mara Mattushka

This past semester, GME was pleased to announce the complete INDEX Edition Collection from Austria, now available to our North American university colleagues as DVD/DSL bundles. The label INDEX Edition was founded in 2004 by sixpackfilm and Medienwerkstatt Wien. Its aim is to make available previously hard to find moving image works in digital editions. Similar to a small publishing house for quality literature, INDEX Edition releases and distributes audiovisual publications relevant to the history of Austrian (as well as Eastern European) film, video, and media art. Information about the film and video artists, their production methods, and analyses of the individual works are provided in a bilingual German-English booklet that accompanies each release. To further promote educational interest in our GME Streamline titles, we offer free weekly streams of related DSL releases.

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Maria Lassnig's KANTATE (1992, 7.5 Min), is currently streaming for free on GME Streamline for a limited time

Virtually all of the important representatives of both Austrian avant-garde film and media art appear in the selection, paving the way for new academic discourses about their work. This publishing program reveals also how highly differentiated the various movements among Austrian avant-garde film and video makers have been. The collection demonstrates a broad spectrum of concerns and techniques of the artists represented, ranging from the personal to the political, from the formal to the theatrical, from animation to live action, and from found footage to abstraction. These encompass the feminist body concept art of Valie Export and the Viennese Actionism films of Kurt Kren, as well as the celluloid film material studies by Peter Tscherkassky and the found footage narratives of Gustav Deutsch.

Groups of films and filmmakers can be studied together, such as those dedicated to working in the found footage arena—both renowned filmmakers Gustav Deutsch and Peter Tscherkassky, as well as lesser known practitioners of the form, Alfred Kaiser (DECOMPOSING NAZI PHRASEOLOGY) and Norbert Pfaffenblicher (NOTES ON NOTES ON FILM).

Characteristic of the Austrian scene as a whole is a conscious, confident and thoughtful way of dealing with the audiovisual media employed. Peter Weibel’s DEPICTION IS A CRIME analyzes the manner in which media language constructs its own reality. In the live action mode, Michael Pilz’s films focus on developing a formal style that focuses on perception, through an intuitive sense for encounters with people and the space within which they move, whether a taxi driver in New York City (FACTS FOR FICTION), citizens in a public park in Vienna (PARK OF REMEMBRANCE), or inhabitants of a remote Austrian mountain village (HEAVEN AND EARTH). Dietmar Brehm creates films that delve into the realms of dreams and trauma. The varied motion pictures of Ernest Schmidt, Jr. span the genres of Actionism, conceptual art, and the diary film.

Scenes from new releases by Maria Lassnig and Mara Mattushka

Works by women artists are strongly represented, including Martina Kudláček’s portrait of pioneering filmmaker Marie Menken, the iconic works of Valie Export, films and an accompanying book of photographs by Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller, the animation films by Maria Lassnig (the subject of recent major museum retrospectives and a recent article in The New York Review of Books) and moving image works by Lassnig’s former student and collaborator Mara Mattushka, who’s own collection of short films in IRIS SCAN range from motherhood to monster movies via her alter ego Mimi Minus.

Some of the artists’ work is represented in depth across multiple digital publications (including 3 each for Kurt Kren and Peter Tscherkassky). In addition to monographic works by individual artists, we also present in this series compilations of films and videos by various artists, such as VISIONARY: CONTEMPORARY SHORT DOCUMENTARIES AND EXPERIMENTAL FILMS FROM AUSTRIA. These works range from abstract music videos and conceptual architectural studies to elaborate computer animations; they have rarely been seen except at festivals and performance settings.

The INDEX Edition series has also enlarged its program to encompass international artists from Eastern Europe, so as to further an intensive discovery of common artistic horizons across physical borders.

For a full list of all available titles, click here; all of these digital editions can be ordered as DVD/DSL bundles or as individual DVDs.