Carte Blanche for Peter Konlechner

Film Museum Retrospective (May 9 to June 20, 2014)

 
Prior to the founding of the Austrian Film Museum, Peter Konlechner (born 1936) was already a respected figure in the film world: In the fall of 1961, as a student of telecommunication engineering at Vienna's University of Technology, he launched the Cinestudio, a regular program of film classics and contemporary cinema. In 1962, while organizing an International Short Film Festival at the Cinestudio, he met Peter Kubelka, marking the start of their collaboration and leading to the creation of the Film Museum in 1964.

For four decades, until his retirement in 2001, Konlechner has shaped film culture in Austria and beyond – yet, few people know which individual works of cinema are closest to his heart. On the occasion of the Museum's anniversary, Peter Konlechner has been invited to present his condensed view of the medium in a "Carte Blanche" program: which films and filmmakers, which concrete moments in the history of the medium, are the most indispensible for him? How can a career that embraces the organization of hundreds of retrospectives, the building of a museum dedicated to film, and encounters with innumerable great artists be highlighted through the screening of a limited number of works? With this series, Peter Konlechner will attempt to express "his" cinema in crystalline form – as well as his life's work as a film educator.

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Projects in the framework of the Film Museum's 50th anniversary are supported by the Austrian Film Institute, the City of Vienna and the Austrian Federal Chancellery.