To watch the following Otto Muehl films click here.
1. Manopsychotisches Ballet (Fotograf by Hans Sohm and Kamera Jörg Siegert) (1970) 2.Investmentfonds (Fotograf by Ludwig Hoffenreich and Kamera Hermann Jauk) (1970) 3.Psychotic Party (1970) 4.Stille Nacht (Fotograf by Gebhardt and Kamera Hans Peter Kochenrath) (1969) 5.Kardinal (Kamera by Helmut Kronberger) (1967) 6.Psycho-Motorische Gerauschaktion (Kamera by Peter C. Fluger) (1967) 7.Sodoma (1969) 8.Wehrertüchtigung (Fotograf by Ludwig Hoffenreich and Kamera Peter C. Fluge) (1967) 9.Scheißkerl (1969) (Kamera by Kurt Kren) 10.Satisfaction (1968) (Kamera by Dobrovitsch and Kurt Kren) 11.Oh Sensibility (1970) (Fotograf by Ludwig Hoffenreich and Kamera Hermann Jauk) 12.Unknown Title, (Unknown Date) 13.Der Geile Wotan (1970) (Kamera by Kurt Kren)
"I set my sights on the human body and realized things were moving at last, during my first material action, I soiled a female body with mud, paint, rubbish and paste, and tied it up in old rags and ropes dipped in mud."
- Otto Muehl, 1963
Otto Muehl (born June 16, 1925, at Grodnau, Burgenland, Austria) is an Austrian artist, who is best known as one of the co-founders as well as a main participant of Viennese Actionism. In 1972 he founded the Friedrichshof Commune, which has been viewed by some as an authoritarian sect that existed for several years before falling apart in the 1990s. Muehl himself was sentenced to 7 years imprisonment for sexual offences with adolescents. He was released after serving six and a half years and set up a smaller commune in Portugal.
In 1943, Otto Muehl served in the Wehrmacht and in 1944 he was sent to the Front. After the war, he studied teaching German and History, and Pedagogy of Art at the Wiener Akademie der bildenden Künste.
In the sixties his aim was 'to overcome painting on canvas through staging the process of its destruction'. He made rhizomatic structures with scrap iron ("Gerümpelplastiken"), but soon proceeded to the "Aktion" in the vein of the New York Happenings. In 1962, when he was 37, the first "Aktion" "Die Blutorgel" was performed in Muehl's atelier in the Perinetgasse by Muehl himself, Adolf Frohner and Hermann Nitsch. The "Fest des psycho-physischen Naturalismus" and "Versumpfung einer Venus" followed in 1963. From 1964 to 1966 many "Malaktionen" were filmed by Kurt Kren and photographed by Ludwig Hoffenreich. In 1966 a new concept of Aktion was developed with Günter Brus: instead of the canvas, the body became the scene of action. In 1968, Muehl, Brus and Oswald Wiener organised an Aktionsveranstaltung "Kunst und Revolution" in the University of Vienna, which caused a scandal in the press; they were arrested and Brus emigrated to Berlin.
Gradually, Muehl began to distance himself from "Aktion". He regarded the "happening as a bourgeois artform, mere art". The "transition from art to life" resulted in the founding of the commune as a kind of anti-society. All members submitted to the so-called Aktionsanalyse. The declared aim was the destruction of bourgeois marriage and private property, free love, and collective education of the children. In 1974 he played a small role as a member of an anarchic/therapy commune in Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie. In the eighties, tensions within the commune increased until they culminated in a revolt under the direction of Altenberg. When, on top of that, Muehl was arrested and imprisoned in 1991, the commune fell apart. In 1997, when he was 72, Muehl moved to Faro, Portugal to start a new commune experiment. Despite suffering from Parkinsons disease, Muehl continued his art work, and in 2002 developed "electric painting films", a new technique in which he paints digital photos from actions using a computer tablet and pen and edits the process into films. References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Muehl
Harvard Film Archive Program Notes: "Mary Ellen Bute, a true poet of cinema, created a joyously Joycean, fascinating, and imaginative film, a mixture of the aural—for Joyce’s words are not only spoken but seen in subtitles—and the visual. A delight to critics, Joyceans, and lovers of film, Passages from Finnegans Wake suggested a new orientation for students of Joyce as well as for cineastes. Time magazine wrote that “its dream sequences . . . featuring reverse footage, collages and montages . . . frequently are as challenging and witty as Joyce’s prose.”
Review by Leonard Maltin: Finnegan's Wake (1965) 97 m ***1/2 D: Mary Ellen Bute. Stars: Page Johnson, Martin J Kelly, Jane Reilly, Peter Haskell. James Joyce's classic story of Irish tavern-keeper who dreams of attending his own wake is brought to the screen with great energy and control. New York Times Review: "Finnegan's Wake was the first attempt to cinematize the works of Irish author James Joyce. Based more on a stage adaptation by Mary Manning than the Joyce novel itself, the film concentrates on Dublin pubkeeper Finnegan (Martin J. Kelly), who while in the throes of inebriation has a vision of his own death. As the bemused Finnegan lies in his coffin, his friends gather for his wake. The "corpse" tries to cut through the keening and platitudes by probing the innermost thoughts of those closest to him. The surprising aspect of Finnegan's Wake is that so much of its difficult text works on screen--a tribute to the loving care of scripter/director/editor Mary Ellen Bute, who while preparing this film spent her waking hours picking the brains and burrowing through the resource materials of the James Joyce Society." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
"Passages is a trove of superimpositions, flashbacks, varied angles, slow motion, intercutting, rapid motion, stop action, negative images, documentary footage, and finally sub-titles ... It brings in television, the H-bomb, the twist, interplanetary rockets. Bute believed that Joyce would have accepted the modern elements in a film based on his 1939 novel, and she even quoted a line from Finnegans Wake that mentions television." Lillian Schiff, "The Education of Mary Ellen Bute" in Film Library Quarterly 17:2 (1984). Rpt., abr. in Women and Animation: A Compendium. Ed. Jayne Pilling. London: British Film Institute, 1992.
In the 1960's to 1970's, Herb Kosower was a professor of animation and film graphics in the USC film program. A young George Lucas and John Milius were among his students.
Banished From Eden by Todor Dinov. Rare animation from Bulgaria. Todor Dinov (Bulgarian: Тодор Динов) (July 24, 1919 — June 17, 2004) is informally known as the Father of BulgarianAnimation. During his lifetime he wrote and directed more than 40 short animated films and several live-action feature films, and was also a popular illustrator, painter, graphic artist and caricaturist.
Dinov was born to a Bulgarian family in Dedeagach in Western Thrace (today Alexandroupoli, Greece) and finished school in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. He studied at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow under the tutelage of distinguished Soviet animators such as Ivan Ivanov-Vano. Dinov created his own first animated film, Yunak Marko (English: Marko the Hero), in 1955. Perhaps his best-known animated film in the West is the five-minute short Margaritka (English: The Daisy), produced in 1965. The film features a square-shaped little man trying to cut down a daisy and failing, then becoming more and more enraged as he tries increasingly brutal methods against the flower; in the end, the daisy only responds to the love of a child. Oddly, Margaritka won a prize for best children's film even though it was meant for adults.
He founded the first animation studio in Bulgaria, setting the highest quality professional standards for producing animation in his country. Later, he created the Animation Department (now a separate major) and taught animation classes at the Theatre and Film Arts Institute. Dinov was also a member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
In 1999, Dinov was awarded the highest-rank Bulgarian medal — the Stara Planina order (First Degree). In 2003 he received the Crystal Pyramide Award of the Bulgarian Filmmaker Union for lifetime achievement to the art of Bulgarian animation.
Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138 4EB is a short film directed by George Lucas in 1967 while he attended the University of Southern California. The movie exists in 16mm reference print, on videocassette with a run time of 15 minutes, and on the special director's edition DVD of THX 1138,,an alternate version of Lucas' 1971 directorial debut which feature's newly added scenes. This short was used as the basis for Lucas' first feature film in 1971 titled, THX-1138 and starring Robert Duvall, Maggie McOmie, and Donald Pleasence.
