Antoinette Zwirchmayr 2: Wonderful Wound

For over a decade Antoinette Zwirchmayr has been making analog films that give visual form to the fragile relationships between people, things, nature, and constructed spaces. Her work is scintillating and enigmatic, it encompasses fragmentary image compositions and autobiographical memory narratives, filmic treatments of theoretical texts, and abstract fictional films. Bodies, objects, landscapes, and interiors are condensed in these films into precise arrangements and choreographic patterns of movement. The synergy of materials, colours, surfaces, and textures creates a sensory space of hypnotic beauty that also harbours traces of the obscure and unfathomable.

In her films, Antoinette Zwirchmayr places people and objects in various natural environments in a way that is both incongruous and evocative, resulting in a fascinating confusion of scale, abstraction, and representation. Her work demonstrates an abiding interest in juxtaposing strikingly different kinds of substances – skin and stone, fire and ice, plant and textile – and an extraordinary ability to convey the emotional, mental, and physical frisson that results. She films both bodies and landscapes with such an attention to detail and texture that the bodies are transformed into landscapes, and vice versa. This is the case not only in the highly condensed, meditative fictions, but also in the personal essay films that explore the remarkable, troubled history of her own family in a singularly elliptical style.

Most of the films in these two programmes are screened on 16 mm and 35 mm.

Antoinette Zwirchmayr will introduce the screenings of her two programmes of films to talk more about her filmmaking.

Screened:
SAT 28/10, 17:00 SLOTTS

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JEAN LUC NANCY

The full moon on the black night sky, a swinging pendulum, constellations, three women seen from behind in a miniature inspired by the leading contemporary French philosopher. Concrete and abstract, sensual and theoretical, thought out and felt. In short; it is the complex essence of cinema.

Austria 2018 / 16 mm / 5:00 / Director: Antoinette Zwirchmayr

OCEANO MARE

Seemingly stranded and enthralled like a somnambulist, a female figure amid a rocky, dried-up riverbed. Entwined in the branches of the sparse vegetation, now lying on the delicate fissures of the parched ground, from these convergences and from the interplay of images arises a sort of approximation, or analogy.

Austria 2020 / 16 mm / 7:00 / Director: Antoinette Zwirchmayr

THE PIMP AND HIS TROPHIES

“The first time I visited my grandfather’s brothel I was seven years old. We were sitting on a couch in the entrance hall and he was telling me a story. Just as the story was reaching its climax, he suddenly stopped speaking and left the room with two prostitutes. I looked over at my grandmother, whose gaze was empty, as if she were somewhere else.”

Austria 2015 / 35 mm / 24:00 / Director: Antoinette Zwirchmayr

QUESTIONNAIRE

Is it possible to ask images questions, and if so, what would they answer? Questionnaire designs an exploration of the genesis of meaning in a picture-sound constellation that sets in motion several mental circular movements.

Austria 2020 / 7:00 / Director: Antoinette Zwirchmayr

JOSEF – MY FATHER’S CRIMINAL RECORD

Together with a friend, Josef, Antoinette’s father, robs a bank at 17 and gets caught. A few weeks later he is released from prison and returns to his home village. Faced with the difficulty of having to deal with the villagers’ open contempt, he runs away to Brazil.

Austria 2015 / 35 mm / 19:00 / Director: Antoinette Zwirchmayr