Space Exploration with Johann Lurf

VERTIGO RUSH (2007) by Johann Lurf

Sunday February 27, 2022, 7:30 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 W. Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles

Free parking on the street and across Beverly at the church

In-person: Filmmaker Johann Lurf

Tickets: $12 general, $8 students/seniors, $0 Filmforum members. $12 tickets can be purchased in advance at https://dice.fm/event/5qbp8-screening-space-exploration-with-johann-lurf-27th-feb-2220-arts-archives-los-angeles-tickets

Vienna-based artist Johann Lurf is fascinated by image production and exhibition technologies, and his filmmaking practice is a diverse and thrillingly engaging demonstration of those passions. Across his eclectic body of truly inventive films, he employs an acute awareness of the possibilities for magic and revelation to be found in the interplay of real and filmic space. The elemental qualities of the moving image are activated via his conceptual and technical artistry and the medium itself always plays an active role. The result is an expanded adventure of cinema that involves the viewer in a thoughtful exploration of perspective and time.

This program will span a variety of short films, diverse in their themes, materials, and execution, but all representing the poetry, discipline, humor, and excitement that one can expect from any work by Johann Lurf. Found footage is radically re-presented to release its formal energies, artful and revelatory surveillance is made of eerie and sinister landscapes, and the elemental properties of cinema itself are thrown into powerful, surprising relief through Lurf’s articulate and inspired filmic alchemy.

In person: Johann Lurf, with thanks to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, California Institute of the Arts, and the Austrian Consulate General Los Angeles.

Program and notes by Mark Toscano. All films courtesy of Johann Lurf. 35mm titles will show digitally.

Note: This program contains some elements of flicker.

Johann Lurf will also be presenting his film ★ at the Academy Film Museum on February 24 at 7:30 pm. “A one-of-a-kind cinematic experience, Vienna-based filmmaker Johann Lurf’s ★ is quite literally the ultimate cosmic trip through the entire history of cinema.” For more information: https://www.academymuseum.org/en/programs/by-johann-lurf-7864cff2-60f6-275a-dfbd-1f37976bd03b

Johann Lurf (1982) is an artist, filmmaker, and projectionist based in Vienna. For the past fifteen years, he has produced an eclectic body of moving image work very engaged with the rich technical and material expressivity of the filmmaking process. Melding conceptual and formal strategies with a rich aesthetic sensitivity and poetic nuance, his films have shown extensively internationally and he is widely recognized as an influential and unique practitioner of cinematic exploration. https://www.johannlurf.net/en/

Total Screening time - 69 minutes

Proof of vaccination or recent negative test required at door, plus masks required.

Cavalcade (2019)

35mm screening digitally, color, sound, 5m

Los Angeles premiere!

Picture Perfect Pyramid (2013)

16mm, color, silent 24fps, 5m

Picture Perfect Pyramid is a 16mm film which in counter-clockwise spirals, circles a large pyramid structure that was built on the outskirts of Vienna in 1983. Using twenty-four positions the film was shot over the course of an entire day, with one shot per hour. The camera moves continuously and almost imperceptibly, covering the surrounding area while the landmark remains centered in the frame. Today the building, a former indoor swimming pool, serves as a venue for various events; from right wing party gatherings to an erotic fair that presents a live show with lights visible even from the outside of the pyramid. In filming the building, a structural approach focused on geometry was used in order to achieve less subjectively motivated images. (Translation: Seth Wein

12 Explosionen / 12 Explosions (2008)

digital, color, sound, 6m

In the short 12 explosionen, screened at this year‘s International Film Festival Rotterdam, fireworks are let of by invisible hands in the desolate outskirts of a nocturnal city. Kaboom! The blast blows the camera into another angle. Still no human presence. Only these big bangs to end all time. I‘m still waiting for the last one, although the film is over for a while now. Or did the world end when the screen went black? - Dana Linssen in filmkrant

Zwölf Boxkämpfer jagen Viktor quer über den großen Sylter Deich 140 9 / The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog (2009)

35mm screening digitally, color, sound, 3m

RECONNAISSANCE (2012)

digital, color, sound, 5m

Endeavour (2010)

digital, color, sound, 16m

Endeavour was made using NASA footage recorded by several cameras attached to the space shuttle booster rockets. The film tracks the path of the rockets from their launch to their flight into outer space and their eventual descent into the ocean, cutting rhythmically from one camera to the next to show the process from multiple angles. The footage is from one day launch and one night launch, the former accompanied by tension-filled background noise that is synchronized with the video and beats out a steady rhythm, the latter accompanied by silence, which upsets the viewer's sense of equilibrium and, when combined with the flashes that burst like fireworks in pitch-darkness of space, fosters a meditative, trip-like sensation. LURF's skillful editing transforms the flight of the boosters, something impossible to experience with the naked eye, into a visual journey full of both the detachment peculiar to experimental films and the romanticism of science fiction movies. -- Keiko Okamura, How Physical - Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Vision, Metropolitan Museum of Photography Tokyo

EMBARGO (2014)

digital, color, sound, 10m

Los Angeles premiere!

VERTIGO RUSH (2007)

35mm screening digitally, color, sound, 19m

A simple idea: find a beautiful sun-dappled verdant forest scene, then dolly zoom in and out slowly, then at incrementally increasing speed, until the image mutates into a merciless visceral assault that interrogates the very nature of human perception. Vertigo Rush is an ingenious formal experiment, representing an unyielding insistence on exploring the unique qualities of captured reality via the techniques of moving image art to quite simply blow your mind. -- Jury Argument Best International Experimental Short, Leeds Film Festival in November 2008