Complete Works of Kurt Kren and VALIE EXPORT Digitized

News

Kader from “15/67 TV” by Kurt Kren (Archive rww), sixpackfilm

Sixpackfilm (Vienna) announced that digitized versions of the films by Kurt Kren and VALIE Export are now available for distribution. The negatives were digitized by the Austrian Film Museum in cooperation with sixpackfilm and are now available as film copies, DCP or high-resolution files for screenings.

VALIE EXPORT, which celebrates her 80th birthday in 2020, had already made her mark on video art in the early 1970s, but also used film as a material, especially for feature-length films. The best possible digital reproductions of her complete works were produced, both from the performance works shot on video, as well as from the experimental films and the three feature films.

Although film museums and festivals are mainly interested in the projection of 16mm film copies in the case of a historically recognized film artist like Kurt Kren, the demand for exhibition spaces is also increasing in his case, and these almost always require digital versions.

For decades, the Austrian Film Museum has preserved films and film-related materials that have been handed down on physical media. In order to preserve and make accessible the film heritage[1], however, the Film Museum pursues a hybrid strategy: the preservation and safeguarding of the film material as original, museum object and “dense” and consistent information carrier, and the digitization in order to make the information content of many otherwise inaccessible film documents accessible to a broad public.

Sixpackfilm proposes two possibilities for tour programmes that provide a compact overview of the work of the two artists.

 

URL: VALIE EXPORT Filme & Videos

URL: The Lord of the Frames: Kurt Kren (1929 – 1998)

[1] The former director of the Filmmuseum, Alexander Horwarth, in an interesting article in the FAZ in 2018, expressed himself critically on the rescue of film heritage in Germany: “The cinema doesn’t fit on any hard drive”. (in German)