Kurt Kren : Structural Films
- Submitting institution
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Anglia Ruskin University Higher Education Corporation
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 507
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Intellect
- ISBN
- 9781783205516
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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2
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Kurt Kren was a pioneering figure in experimental cinema, whose career spanned the late 1950s through to the mid 1990s. His Aktionist films, made with the performance artists Otto Mühl and Günter Brus, make up the more notorious half of his output. This book, the first in the English-language, concerns his ‘structural’ films, which Rees, Hamlyn and I saw as more important. Arguably, they are also his most influential films: their systematic approach to filmmaking provided a model for subsequent filmmakers as well as ways of thinking about the aesthetics of digital media.
The book includes newly commissioned essays on individual films and a selection of earlier essays and interviews that have been long out of print, sometimes deriving from little-known ‘underground’ magazines. We also tracked down and included a selection of Kren’s film scores and diagrams, and newly reproduced film stills and filmstrips.
In early meetings, Rees, Hamlyn and I, along with other colleagues, discussed the list of films that ought to be covered in the book, the range of historical articles we thought valuable to reprint and the list of writers whom we wanted to commission as contributors. My role in editing the book developed when Rees became ill and too unwell to continue with the project. I finished Rees’s introduction with Nicky Hamlyn and worked closely with various authors on draft versions of their texts, as well as communicating with the authors of historical essays. Hamlyn and I tracked down the diagrams and produced the stills and filmstrips. I also contributed three essays to the book: ‘Versuch mit sythetisichem Ton (Test)’ (pp.9–15), ‘Bäume im Herbst’ (pp.39–47) and ‘Grün Rot’ (pp.91–99). These essays involve a close analysis and critical interpretation of the eponymous films and discuss their relationship to alternative models of structural film.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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