Focus

Moucle Blackout

82 mins

Moucle Blackout (b. 1935) was a key figure of the postwar Austrian avant-garde. Her film work is characterised by a manifold of material and technical experimentation, with chromatic layering and a reconfiguration of optical space through cross-fades, dissolves, and double exposures. Blackout’s distinct filmic language is rooted in her multidisciplinary interests, encompassing sculpture, design, and photography alongside cinema.

Blackout’s work approaches the dialectical exchange between the body and culture, often examining the social structures painfully inscribed in the female body. Through an intricate ciphering of the filmic field, she approaches the problem of social and sexual dependence as embryonary to an unactualized, never attainable liberation. The human in Blackout’s filmic topos lives bound by the symbolic, but not by language, in a momentarily ‘denaturalized’ nature that is not yet culture. Through the use of technological tools - notably the camera - there is a return to the uncanny unruliness of humans, the death drive seeded in life, and the violence of forces of nature that we long sought to break from in our civilizing process, which these very tools sustain.

The program opens with a short introductory work by Dirk de Bruyn, developed in direct relation to Moucle Blackout and Marc Adrian during their presence in Australia in the 1990s. Initiated in 1996 and completed in 2026, the film carries forward this encounter across time, marking both a continuity and a delay within the history of the work.

TICKETS

Fri 29 May

21:30 - 23:00 / ACUD KINO

Dirk de Bruyn
THOUGHT/ACTION
Australia, 1996–2026, 10’ 00”, 16mm, DCP, World Premiere

Initiated in 1996 and completed in 2026, this home-processed 16mm film was inspired by Marc Adrian’s Total (1968) and incorporates the voices of Moucle Blackout and László Dudás. Partially shot at Hearst’s San Simeon Castle, in Canada, and at the Royal Melbourne Show, the work explores the possibility of overcoming traumatic thought through material actions on the film surface. The temporal gap of its completion registers both the persistence of and resistance to traumatic experience.

LOSS
Austria, 1998, 12’ 00”, 16mm, DCP

A film that dwells in time and space as transient shelters, preserving memories of fugitive passages through the world.

NEUE WEGE BRICHT NEUE WELT AUS
Austria, 1996, 11’ 00”, 16mm, DCP

The result of a collaboration with the writer Karin Schöffauer. A voyage into solitary zones.

DER GALAKTISCHE NORDPOL LIEGT IM HAAR DER BERENICE
Austria, 1992, 14’ 00”, 16mm, DCP

An archaeology of human passions, displaced and distorted by civilization. A taxonomy of the manifold relations of force that take shape within desire. A mythopoiesis of phantasmagorical dominions that begin with the deployment of sexuality.

O.K.
Austria, 1987, 5’ 00”, 16mm, DCP

Initial visual materials were filmed on Super 8, then projected onto Blackout’s hand and re-filmed on 16mm. A demonstration of the tangentiality of images and of their palpable nature.

STONED VIENNA
Austria, 1976–1979, 20’ 00”, 16mm, DCP

Beneath a coating of signs, a city of high bastions aligned in successive rows emerges—a city of concrete utopias that cannot find ways to tell its past, carrying its decay as a measure between space and desire.

DIE GEBURT DER VENUS
Austria, 1970–1972, 5’ 00”, 16mm, DCP

A diverted aetiological poem on the making of the body as a carrier of cultural phantasms—a revolt of the unconscious against the apparatuses of control perfecting human organs.

WALK IN
Austria, 1969, 5’ 00”, 16mm, DCP

An act of ordering experience through the organization of film into a mathematical system. A scene of 720 frames—a man entering a room, sitting at a table, filling a pipe, and smoking—is divided into six equal parts and repeated according to a structural scheme created by Blackout.

Moucle Blackout

Fri 29 May

Wed 27

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Fri 29

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Sun 31