18:00 Short film program 1

TRT: 75 min.

■ TRAILER (mit Sasha Pirker)
AT, 2 min., 2016

After Lotte Schreiber’s and Sasha Pirker’s film “Exhibition Talks” was awarded the Diagonale Prize for Innovative Cinema in 2015, the two filmmakers created the festival trailer the following year. They took the form at its word.

■ QUADRO
AT, 10 min., 2002

The title “Quadro” refers to the square floor plan of a monumental concrete structure in Trieste, Italy. In her cinematic portrait of this 1960s housing block, which embodies the contradiction between radical and failed ideas of modernism, Schreiber formulates many elements of her cinematic language for the first time. It also marks the beginning of a long-standing collaboration with experimental musician Stefan Németh (Innode), whose sound creates a deliberately raw, often very loud friction in dialogue with the images.

■ I. E. [SITE 01-ISOLE EOLIE]
AT, 8 min., 2002

Clouds drift by, the sky trembles. Again and again, the static shots and their analog materiality are interrupted by shaky video recordings. These intense movements are created by an approaching, a forward motion, a physicality of the images. With heavy steps, over stones, through tall grass, along the sea, past fishermen. What’s this rumbling? At first we hear it from afar, then it comes closer and closer. It rumbles incessantly, in the landscape as well as in the framed images. Until it finally appears – smoking – the Stromboli.

■ DOMINO
AT, 12 min., 2005

Continuing her montage concept of disruption, the filmmaker takes us on a journey through the impressive and unusually wintry landscape of Greece. She documents many unfinished concrete structures that, like geometric foreign bodies or dystopian skeletons, stand scattered across the Peloponnese and Crete. Car and camera movements lead from one structure to the next, from one static image to the next. “Domino”, also referring to a concrete construction system designed by Le Corbusier, is the third part of Schreiber's “cinematic cartographies” after Quadro and “I. E. [site 01-isole eolie].”

■ GHL
AT, 16 min., 2012

“I've lost my sense of direction. The system is out of control,” we hear a voiceover from a phone. A middle-aged man in a suit and tie, carrying a briefcase and cell phone, trudges aimlessly through the area. We are at Gänsehäufel in Vienna, which is known as a popular recreation and outdoor swimming area, crowded with guests in summer. Now it is autumn: the wind has blown fallen leaves into piles, cabins and walking paths are empty, and the complex feels ghostly and eerily deserted. Who is the man speaking to, and to whom is he listening? We hear him, again and again, speaking in fragments, apologetic, accusatory, judgmental. Maybe these are his inner conflicts? While looking down from the bathing tower onto the architecture of this small cabin city, he appears to silently negotiate with himself. His tension transfers to the camera view, and, together with him, we recognize him like a reflection, as he passes by in the distance between the concrete blocks.

■ MANCHMAL ALSO DENKT MAN, WEIL ES SICH BEWÄHRT HAT.
WITTGENSTEINS HAUS.
AT, 20 min., 2016

Four years had passed since “GHL”, but the protagonist appears to have walked into the Wittgenstein House straight from Gänsehäufel. Here, too, he seems lost. And while he’s lost, he observes other lost people scattered throughout the house. They follow a mysterious order and go about wonderfully absurd activities. He’s a little puzzled, but not overly so. An athlete climbs into the house on a ladder. A woman sorts beads according to an opaque system. There is also a chemical laboratory, a woman with glasses, a fitness trainer, and a man drawing circles. Another man scans the surface of a vase with a bamboo stick. Silence provokes the atmosphere, until we finally arrive at a sickbed with many flies. What language is spoken here? And what time is it, actually?

■ IF I HAD LAND UNDER MY FEET
AT, 7 min., 2016

How can a statistical figure be made visible — especially when that figure represents people who have lost their lives while fleeing across the Mediterranean? With “If I Had Land Under My Feet”, Lotte Schreiber stages a performative act in public space and simultaneously translates it into a short film. 200 people position themselves in a grid on an empty street and disappear from the image, one after the other. Silent, terrifying and shockingly clear, Schreiber conveys the difference between presence and absence, contrasting an abstract mass with individual human beings.