By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
if film goes under, I will go under with it: Peter Kubelka (hearts) emulsion
After a 26-year hiatus, experimental filmmaker and Anthology Film Archives co-founder Peter Kubelka has a new pic, which he describes to Michelle Silva in the SF Bay Guardian: “In a visual culture increasingly permeated by digital imagery, the disintegration of the exhibition and experience of cinema appears imminent. Peter Kubelka reminds American audiences of the physical presence of cinema as an inimitable medium. With a filmography that is only 63 minutes long, avant-garde master Kubelka (born in Austria in 1934) has progressed film by his metric and metaphoric montages, which are attentive to tactile qualities and mechanics that are exclusive to film. Since the 1950s, Kubelka has remained a committed proponent of film as a pure medium…
“After a 26-year hiatus, he has re-emerged with a new film, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), and has toured and lectured in several cities throughout the US. The survival of film as an exhibition medium is… an issue right now. [Instructors] are projecting DVDs instead of the actual work. As a major founder of film culture, how do you feel about the future of cinema? I do not allow my films to be transferred to video and shown in digital form, which means that if film goes under, I will go under with it. But I don’t do this in order to go under. I’m absolutely convinced cinema as a classic medium will stay on, because it has a heart core which cannot be replaced by any other medium. [More ping and pong at the link.]