Peter Kubelka

Born in Vienna in 1934, Peter Kubelka studied at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Rome. His metric films Adebar (1957), Schwechater (1958) and Arnulf Rainer (1960) appeared at the beginning of the international development of structural film. His other films include: Mosaik im Vertrauen (1955), Unsere Afrikareise (1966), Pause! (1977), Dichtung und Wahrheit (1996/2003) and, finally, Antiphon (2012). Kubelka is among the most internationally significant artists of independent filmmaking.
 
In the late 1950s, Kubelka began to organize film events for international artists talks at the Galerie (nächst) St. Stephan in Vienna and during the "Hochschulwochen" in Alpbach. In 1964, he co-founded the Austrian Film Museum together with Peter Konlechner. Kubelka and Konlechner served as the Film Museum's directors until 2001.
 
In 1967 and 1968, he was involved in the UN's film library in New York and a board member of the New York Film Maker's Coop. Countless screenings of his films and lectures at more than 50 American universities followed.
 
In 1970, Kubelka helped co-found Anthology Film Archives in New York where he was first able to realize his concept of the Invisible Cinema and served on the selection committee for the film cycle "Essential Cinema."
 
In 1978, he established the film department of the public academy of fine arts, the Städelschule, in Frankfurt am Main. In 1980, the film professorship was renamed "Film and Cooking as an Artistic Genre." Kubelka was the school's rector from 1985 to 1988.
 
In 1980, he founded the ensemble Spatium Musicum, whose activities included concerts in Chicago and New York.
 
In 1989, he realized the Invisible Cinema at the Austrian Film Museum and conceived the cyclical program What Is Film, which has run each Tuesday at the Film Museum since 1996. The eponymous book edited by Stefan Grisseman, Alexander Horwath and Regina Schlagnitweit in 2010, proposes a way to expand one's appreciation of the films on another level.
 
Kubelka's lectures on film and cultural history at the Film Museum and at more than 100 international museums and universities are a unique component of his artistic creation.
 
In 1980, Kubelka received the Grand Austrian State Prize for his entire oeuvre and, in 2005, the Austrian Medal for Science and Art. In 2006, he was made an honorary member of FIAF (Fédération International des Archives du Film) and in 2015, he was awarded the Goldene Ehrenzeichen für Verdienste um das Land Wien.
 
Kubelka celebrated his 80th birthday on March 23, 2014. As part of its 50-year celebration, the Film Museum screened his films multiple times, presented little known documents about different moments of his creative life, gave a comprehensive overview of the work of his former students at the Städelschule and showed – for the first time in the "Invisible Cinema" – his multi-part projection performance Monument Film from the year 2012. The Film Museum also marked the occasion by releasing a DVD of Martina Kudláček's documentary Fragments of Kubelka (2012).
 
Since May 2020, under the title "Detritus of Evolution. The Peter Kubelka Collection," Kubelka's comprehensive collection of cultural objects, sedimented, “silent,” or immaterial knowledge has been the subject of an artistic and scholarly research project.