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Megan Hoetger, “Falter, Stumble, Plunge: Kurt Kren’s Structures” on occasion of the film program Underground International: Kurt Kren and Tomonari Nishikawa, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, California, November 2018. www.bampfa.org(opens in a new tab).
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Portrait of Kurt Kren taken at his film retrospective, San Francisco Cinematheque, California, 1996.
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Megan Hoetger, “Falter, Stumble, Plunge: Kurt Kren’s Structures” on occasion of the film program Underground International: Kurt Kren and Tomonari Nishikawa, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, California, November 2018. www.bampfa.org(opens in a new tab).
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Still. Kurt Kren, 44/85 Foot’-age Shoot’- out, 1985.
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Megan Hoetger, “Falter, Stumble, Plunge: Kurt Kren’s Structures” on occasion of the film program Underground International: Kurt Kren and Tomonari Nishikawa, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, California, November 2018. www.bampfa.org(opens in a new tab).
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Kurt Kren’s stamp collection. Kurt Kren Archive, Museum of Modern Art, Vienna.
“But moving below the surface grandeur of the formal imperial city, 46/90 Falter 2 also moved into another space that Kren knew quite well: the underground. Alongside his mathematical organization and formal techniques, the infrastructures of urban life, the rhythms of its inhabitants, and the pulsations of life lived in subcultural undergrounds structure Kren’s films across his forty-year practice. There are indeed few experimental filmmakers—and few people in general—who have borne witness to the incredible range of underground worlds that Kren did; and he always had his Bolex on hand to record.”
Alongside the film screening program Underground International: Kurt Kren and Tomonari Nishikawa, Hoetger was also commissioned to write “Falter, Stumble, Plunge: Kurt Kren’s Structures”(opens in a new tab), a text reflecting on Kren’s 46/90 Falter 2, an 8mm reel held in the BAMPFA archive.
Special thanks to the Pacific Film Archive for the invitation to reflect on Kren’s work.