In 1899, British photographer and inventor Edward Raymond Turner
patented the first color moving picture process, but it was so
complicated that it was never replicated. Following Turner's blueprints
and instructions for the process, researchers at the National Media Museum
digitally copied three frames of film taken from two rolls that were
discovered in 2009. The three frames were reconstructed in Photoshop
with red, green, and blue filters, similar to how they would have been
using Turner's original equipment through the use of colored gels.
As explained in the National
Media Museum's video, each frame of the original film had to be
re-photographed three times with each colored filter (RGB) and compiled
into the final product, which took about three years, thanks to federal
and private funding. The footage was then unveiled to the media for the
first time in 110 years — possibly for the first time ever.
1965 action of Vienna Actionist artist Günter Brus shot and edited by Kurt Kren.
Günter Brus (born September 27, 1938, Ardning, Styria) is an Austrian painter, performance artist, graphic artist and writer.
He was the co-founder in 1964 of Wiener Aktionismus (Viennese Actionism) together with Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. His aggressively presented actionism intentionally disregarded conventions and taboos. Sentenced to 6 months in prison after the "Kunst und Revolution" event at the University of Vienna in 1968, he fled to Berlin with his family and returned to Austria in 1976. Brus urinated into a glass then proceeded to cover his body in his own excrement, and ended the piece by drinking his own urine. During the performance Brus also sang the Austrian national Anthem while masturbating. Bruce ended the piece by vomiting and his arrest. Through this piece and other performance works Brus hoped to reveal the still fascist essence of the nation. Brus also was editor of the "Schastrommel" (author's edition) from 1969 on. In his "Bild-Dichtungen" he achieves a synthesis between poetry and painting.
Brus was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1997. Most of his works contain aspects that are seen as controversial and out of ones comfort zone but this just seems to add to the somewhat endearing factor of his Art.
"It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife. I had a photograph camera with me; I stood in a corner of the entrance hall and took 36 pictures on slide film. At home I put the slides into a slide projector. I took out the lens and filmed the slides by filming directly from the projector - using single frames according to a certain plan. " -Kurt Kren
Kurt Kren (September 20, 1929 - died in Vienna on June 23, 1998) was an Austrian avant garde filmmaker. He is best known for his involvement with the Vienna Aktionists and the group of films that resulted.
Kurt Kren was born in 1929 in Vienna, Austria to a family of a Jewish father (a bank employee) and German mother. From 1939 till the end of World War II Kren lived in Rotterdam, where he was sent with one of the Children's Transports. In 1947 Kren returned to Vienna, and his father provided him a job at the National Bank.
He began a film career in the early 1950s creating experimental short 8mm films. In 1957 he moved to the 16mm format.
In 1966, Kren participated in the Destruction in Art Symposium in London. In 1968 he visited the USA for the first time, showing his films in New York and St. Louis. After a participation in a happening "Kunst und Revolution" ("Art and Revolution") at the University of Vienna in 1968, Kren's films were confiscated and he was fired from the National Bank.
From 1978 until 1989 Kurt Kren lived in the USA, sometimes just in a car, traveling, making presentations and lectures at universities and film schools.
PLOT (Includes Spoilers): The survivors of a destroyed, post-apocalyptic Paris in the aftermath of the Third World War live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send test subjects to different time periods "to call past and future to the rescue of the present". They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally withstand the shock of time travel, but eventually settle upon a male prisoner whose vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the boarding platform ("The Jetty") at Orly Airport is the key to his journey back in time.
He is thrown back to the past again and again to a time before the war, when he had been a child. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman from his memory, who was present at the terminal. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the far future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society. Upon his return, with his mission accomplished, he discerns that he is to be executed by his jailers. He is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time, but he asks to be instead returned to the pre-war time of his childhood, hoping to again find the woman. He is returned and does find her, but an agent of his jailers has followed. The man finds that the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult at the hands of the agent.
