• White page with black text. Large black text reads

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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).

  • Black-and-white portrait of a person on stage. They are wearing a leather jacket and holding a sheet of paper. The person is looking up and smiling.

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    Portrait of Kurt Kren taken at his film retrospective, San Francisco Cinematheque, California, 1996.

  • Digital black text on top of a white page. In the middle, there is a block showing two images, which look like two charts.

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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).

  • A person wearing a suit and tie holds a camera at their eye. The image is slightly blurry.

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    Still. Kurt Kren, 44/85 Foot’-age Shoot’- out, 1985.

  • Digital black text on top of a white page. In the middle, there is a block showing two images. On the left, a close-up of a white door, showing the door knob and keyhole. On the right,

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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).

  • On top of a grey background, three different photographs show three different stamps in front of the same blue box. The stamp at the top reads

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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.