A Sentimental Punk: An Incomplete Kurt Kren Film Retrospective, 1956-1996

“Pioneering Austrian experimental filmmaker Kurt Kren (b. Vienna, 1929; d. Vienna 1998) is an elusive yet persistent figure in twentieth-century histories of both performance- and film-based experimentation. His practice was idiosyncratic to say the least, staked in experimentation across media communication platforms in film and the visual arts no matter where that took him—from cooperative theaters, midnight screenings at commercial theaters, fringe film festivals in abandoned subway stations, and punk shows in warehouses; to art schools, artist studios, galleries and international art and film festivals, across nations and continents. In projects ranging from pseudo- pornographic collaborations with the Austrian performance art group known as the Vienna Actionists, to meticulously durational records of everyday space and time, to self-reflexive ‘documents’ of film cooperative life and experimental worlds, Kren combined and re-combined structural film techniques with inquiries into social space, reconstituting what ‘film about film’ or ‘film as film’ might mean.”

A Sentimental Punk was a two-day retrospective program in celebration of Kren’s work and life. The assembly of the program disregarded inherited historical boundaries, instead taking up Kren’s body of works through a series of thematic groupings that point outward to the numerous histories that his rude and playful shadows haunt — from film and art, to media and communication, to underground and counter-culture movements. The retrospective was initiated by a keynote lecture from Hoetger, and screenings were augmented by reflections from film curators Steve Anker and Steve Polta of the San Francisco Cinematheque.