Monday, March 2nd, 7 pm
Goethe Institut Paris, Auditorium
17 Avenue d’Iena, Paris

Curated by Branka Benčić

Vlado Kristl: The End of Order brings together a selection of short films by croatian artist, filmmaker and poet Vlado Kristl. Shaped as a fragmented panorama, gives an overview of the early moving image works by Kristl produced in 1960s, devised to put into dialogue positions and interests Kristl developed in animation techiques and short alternative and experimental films.

Art historians and critics have often claimed about the impossibility to grasp a total view of Vlado Kristl’s unique body of work which has been seen as fragmentary in its various and disparate parts. The screening program as a constellation of his seminal short films produced in Yugoslavia and Germany is seen as a possibility to speak through fractures and fissures, highlight and put in dialogue radical practices, methods, language, concepts, ideas, resonating in Kristl’s works. From Don Quijote, an early animation produced in Zagreb, to radical, critical experimental and alternative short film works such as General, Arme Leute, Madeleine, Madeleine, Sekundenfilme.
Kristl was present at European festival scene, winning awards at anthological historical moments, such as Oberhausen or XPRMNTL, intoducing radical film language in the post-war Europen cinema, ideas of iconoclasm, antidramaturgy, antifilm, anti-aesthetic, often subverting narrative, turning to gag and slapstick as points and turnovers of conventions, and carnevalesque world view… The works explore his constant desire to collapse authority in all its forms. As „cinema by other means“ publication and film Sekundenfilme, are exposing the relation between film, txt, script, proposal, in a context of modest means, conditions and budgets to think about the idea of filmmaking as cinema by all means. In this way screening program The End of Order can therefore be seen as a method to transgress the historical, conceptual and aesthetic boundaries, and is devised as an anti- system protocol, to defy authority, in a manner of Kristl imagined his interventions n and with film. George Clark on the occasion of Vlado Kristl’s film retrospective at TATE Modern suggests that Kristl’s constant revision and reframing of his work in his publications makes explicit the radical, restless energy that colored his practice. – Branka Benčić, from the foreword

Introduced by Branka Benčić and Chris Dercon.

PROGRAM:
Don Quixote (1961) / General (1962) / Arme Leute (DE, 1963) / Madeleine, Madeleine (1963) / Sekundenfilme (1968) / Conference of the Homeless (DE, 2003)

The screening is organized as the closing event of the exhibition Vlado Kristl: Madeleine, Madeleine (Cite Internationale des Arts 13. 2. – 29. 2.)

Organized by: AMCA-Paris and Muzej-Museo Lapidarium, Novigrad-Cittanova (Croatia).
In the framework of Croatian Presidency of the Council of the European Union culture programme.

Thank you / Courtesy: Zagreb Film, Johanna Pauline Maier, Schamoni Films, Donald Houwer, Filmmuseum Muenchen, Slovenia Film Archive, Slovenia Film Centre, Madeleine Kristl