Monument Film
Film and Lecture by Peter Kubelka
November 13, 2024
This year Peter Kubelka celebrated his 90th birthday and the Film Museum its 60th. To mark the occasion, Peter Kubelka is once again presenting his Monument Film. With Arnulf Rainer, in 1960, Peter Kubelka explored four of film’s fundamental elements using a radical partition of 9216 frames: light, darkness, sound and silence. With Antiphon, the answer to this came 52 years later – an exact reversal: White becomes black, silence replaces sound. Together, both films make up Monument Film: Two 35mm projectors are placed in the theater, the projection of Arnulf Rainer is followed by a projection of Antiphon, afterward both films are shown side-by-side in double projection, and finally projected on top of each other.
Kubelka in Film Comment magazine: "2012 is film history's darkest year. The hostile takeover by digital imagery is finally complete. Even though everybody knows how short-lived digital archiving is. But short-term profit is more important. The industry wants to kill off the old medium, by any means, I see my Monument Film as a call for patient defiance."
This year Peter Kubelka celebrated his 90th birthday and the Film Museum its 60th. To mark the occasion, Peter Kubelka is once again presenting his Monument Film. With Arnulf Rainer, in 1960, Peter Kubelka explored four of film’s fundamental elements using a radical partition of 9216 frames: light, darkness, sound and silence. With Antiphon, the answer to this came 52 years later – an exact reversal: White becomes black, silence replaces sound. Together, both films make up Monument Film: Two 35mm projectors are placed in the theater, the projection of Arnulf Rainer is followed by a projection of Antiphon, afterward both films are shown side-by-side in double projection, and finally projected on top of each other.
Kubelka in Film Comment magazine: "2012 is film history's darkest year. The hostile takeover by digital imagery is finally complete. Even though everybody knows how short-lived digital archiving is. But short-term profit is more important. The industry wants to kill off the old medium, by any means, I see my Monument Film as a call for patient defiance."
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