The recent demise of cinema as a medium and/or as an art form does not actually mean its influence or afterlife will diminish or disappear. For literature, visual art, architecture and importantly art history will most certainly remain in various direct or indirect ways influenced and informed by all things cinematic. So-called ‘experimental’ or ‘avant-garde’ film presents a unique platform and perspective for recognising and consolidating on such post-cinematic mutations, transformations and possibilities. This program brings together five experimental films made by Marcus Bergner that in one way or another were influenced by or deal with literature and ‘literary things’. This includes: using and incorporating poetical works by authors such as August Stramm, Ernest Meister or Friederike Mayrocker; basing a film script on a OULIPO type formula; or documenting and recreating a number of sound poetry performances onto film. And as such, each of the films in this program remain steeped in and shaped by essentially errant and transversal modes of approaching literature and cinema. The 16mm films will be projected as films and a new digital work will also be shown. The screening will be intercepted/expanded through a reading of various literary pieces by the filmmaker and others.
Marcus Bergner is an Australian artist living and working in Prague. He has made close to thirty films in as many years that have, with his other artworks, been exhibited extensively throughout Europe, America and Australia. Since 1985 he has collaborated and performed with the Australian sound poetry group Arf Arf. Earlier this year Rumpsti Pumsti in Berlin published a DVD collection of selected films by Arf Arf and mounted an exhibition of their original scores. In 2009 Bergner completed a PhD research project that reconsiders experimental film in relation to recent developments within the practice of art history. Currently he is a lecturer in Media History at the University of NY in Prague.
