IF THE CIRCUMSTANCES ALLOW

Austria 2024
A Film by Karl Wratschko
Shooting format: Slide and Super8 film
Duration: 3 minutes 15 seconds
Screening format: 16mm & DCP, silent, b/w and colour

A cinematic miniature about emigration and work. The search for traces focuses on the seven years of emigration (1933-1940) that Walter Benjamin spent in Paris. During this time he tried to complete his philosophical and literary project, "The Arcades Project ". It will remain a fragment.

1130 2024

Austria 2024
Directors, Producers, Cinematographers, Editors: Aleksandra Kolodziejczyk and Karl Wratschko
Runtime: 1 minutes 12 seconds
Original Format: Super 16mm
Screening Format: 16mm and DCP, b&w, silent

SYNOPSIS:

Vienna in the year 2024: A camera moves through an inconspicuous alley in Hietzing, the 13th district of Vienna (postal code 1130). The shot is in black and white, shaky, and the image is upside down. It ends with a brief shot of the street sign. The camera pans quickly away and is lost in the black. The street is named after a proponent of anti-Semitic and misogynist theories.

A DIALOGUE

Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Editor: Karl Wratschko
Runtime: 4 minutes 44 seconds
Original Format: 4K, color, sound
Screening Format:  DCP

With the support of the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna – MA 7

SYNOPSIS:


A conversation during a bus ride from Jerusalem to Ramallah in the summer of 2022.

more traces

Mediterannean

Austria 2022

Directors, Producers, Cinematographers: Aleksandra Kolodziejczyk und Karl Wratschko
Post-Production and Sound-Design: Hannes Ziegerhofer
Runtime: 2 Minuten 26 Sekunden
Original Format: 16mm, color, sound
Screening Format: 16mm and DCP

With the support of the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna – MA 7 and Foreign Film Scholarship of the City of Graz

World premiere: Kassel Dokfest

SYNOPSIS:

traces

Austria 2021
Directors, Producers, Cinematographers: Aleksandra Kolodziejczyk and Karl Wratschko
Post-Production: Johannes Gierlinger
Runtime: 3 minutes 26 seconds
Original Format: 16mm, b&w/color, silent
Screening Format: 16mm and DCP

With the support of the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna – MA 7 and the Otto Mauer Fund  
Acquired by the City of Vienna for their contemporary art collection (Wien Museum MUSA) and the Regional Government of Styria (Neue Galerie Graz)

World premiere: Manofim – Festival of Contemporary Art, Jerusalem

SYNOPSIS:


traces negotiates the global phenomenon of the climate crisis on a local level, in the context of a single city. The short film portrays all the sculptures of arctic animals in the public space of the city of Vienna. Shot during the hottest summer on record, traces focuses on polar bears, seals and penguins in an extremely hostile environment. Perhaps this is an accurate glimpse into the not too distant future, when people will only know polar animals from zoos, pictures and sculptures?

Remade: Hans Scheugl’s ‘Wien 1170, Schumanngasse’

Austria 2021
Director, Cinematographer: Karl Wratschko
Producer: Karl Wratschko together with God’s Entertainment
Runtime: 2 minutes 40 seconds
Original Format: 16mm, b&w, silent
Screening Format: 16mm and DCP

With the support of the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna - MA7 and SHIFT III - Basis Kultur Wien

World premiere: International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Distributors programme sickpackfilm)

SYNOPSIS:


January 1967: An inconspicuous alley in Vienna. A single tracking shot follows the alley from beginning to end. 53 years ago, Hans Scheugl shot Wien 17, Schumanngasse on a 30.5-meter roll of 16mm film, whereby the length of the roll is identical to the length of the tracking shot: 1.6 kilometeres in 2.5 minutes.


January 2020: The same inconspicuous alley in Vienna, another drive through Schumanngasse. Once again, the camera runs through a 30.5-meter strip of 16mm film. The speed is high. The first apparent conclusion: They were sure going fast back then.

1I15

With the support of the Regional Government of Styria - CINEART and the Cultural Office of the City of Graz

World premiere: Kassel DokFest

In the city of Graz, about 94% of all streets named after significant individuals carry the names of men, while only 6% of the streets are named after women. The film 1I15 documents all locations in Graz named after women. One shot at a time, they enter the viewer’s field of vision, as we gradually draw ever closer to the city center. 1I15 is a kind of inventory, a contribution to an active culture of remembrance and gender equality as well as a critical examination of the representation of women in public space, which can also symbolically stand for other areas of society.

PRÄSENZ / PRESENCE

Austria 2020
Directors, Producers, Cinematographers: Aleksandra Kolodziejczyk and Karl Wratschko
Post-Production: Johannes Gierlinger
Runtime: 6 minutes
Original Format: 16mm, b&w, silent
Screening Format: 16mm and DCP

With the support of the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna - MA7, Otto Mauer Fund, and the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria
World premiere: Kassel DokFest

Award: EXP:AN:DED SHORTS JURY AWARD at “This Human World” - International Human Rights Film Festival in Vienna                                                                           

In most cities, women are severely underrepresented in the urban landscape — a far cry from gender parity. In Vienna, about 90% of all places and streets named after people bear the names of men. The film Presence brings Viennese locations named after women into view and closer to the awareness of the viewer. Similarly to what happens in our perception while we traverse public space, the 397 areas bearing women’s names flash up on the film screen one at a time, a single shot dedicated to each. The countdown effect in these shots, which begin at the periphery and move towards the city center, draws attention to the significance and distribution of places named after women. Presence is a kind of inventory, a contribution to an active culture of remembrance and gender equality as well as a critical examination of the representation of women in public space, which can also symbolically stand for other areas of society and reflect the reality of other cities.

mare liberum | mare clausum

Austria 2019
Director, Producer, Cinematographer: Karl Wratschko
Runtime: 1 minutes 50 seconds
Original Format: 16mm, b&w, silent
Screening Format: 16mm and DCP

With the support of the Foreign Film Scholarship of the Province of Styria
Premiere: Zeta Art Center & Gallery, Tirana

The experimental film mare liberum | mare clausum visualizes the history of the territorial delimitation of the world’s oceans. In the 17th century, the jurist and philosopher Hugo Grotius wrote the highly influential book mare liberum. In it, he argued that the sea should be freely accessible to all and no one had the right to deny others access to it. However, an opposing view was not long in coming. A few decades later, in mare clausum, the British jurist John Selden argued that the sea was as suitable for national appropriation as land territory. After a long polemic, these theories resulted in a synthesis. High seas are now considered international waters, and coastal areas territorial waters.

mare liberum | mare clausum visualizes the shifting demarcation of the seas over the centuries by varying several cinematic techniques: seven different frame rates (12, 16, 18, 20, 24, 48, 64 frames per second) paired with seven different shot sizes. The same amount of 16mm film stock was used for each shot, resulting in the different length of each of the seven shots.

INDEX

Austria 2018
Director, Producer, Cinematographer: Karl Wratschko
Runtime: 2 minutes
Original Format: 16mm, color, silent
Screening Format: 16mm

With the support of the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna - MA7

Premiere: the Austrian Competition of the Vienna Shorts international film festival 
Acquired by the City of Vienna for their contemporary art collection (Wien Museum MUSA)

INDEX shows all embassy buildings in Vienna arranged in order of their rank in the Corruption Perceptions Index 2016. The film consists of an uncut roll of reversal film on which each of the 113 buildings is captured in a single shot. INDEX is an experiment in form and content. In its holistic approach, the film echoes the photographic works of Eugène Atget and August Sander. Moreover, INDEX is based on a phenomenological approach involving the observation of the phenomenon of the city in isolation. The descriptive depiction of this particular segment enables us to perceive this part of the city differently than we normally would, when seeing it embedded in the totality of urban space.

Aesthetically, INDEX is reminiscent of amateur films of the 1950s to the 1970s. This was an era in which contemporary intellectuals envisioned a burgeoning of political filmmaking “from below,” as affordable cameras and film stock led to an increase in filmmaking activity among the socio-economically disadvantaged classes. However, they were soon disappointed in their expectations as it turned out that the proletariat almost invariably filmed their Christmas parties or their children at play. The same held true of the ever-growing middle class, with the bonus addition of their vacations on the Adriatic. INDEX pairs the formalist aesthetics of structuralist avant-garde film with the small-gauge film aesthetics of amateur film. By depicting political reality, the film creates a counterpoint against the above-mentioned “family filmmaking” of small-gauge film amateurs.

I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE ...

Austria 2018
Director, Producer, Screenwriter: Karl Wratschko
Cinematographers: Michael Bachhofer, Johannes Gierlinger
Editor: Johannes Gierlinger
Voice-Over: Selina Graf and Lukas Weiss
Runtime: 7 minutes 40 seconds
Original Format: 16mm and HD, color
Screening Format: DCP

With the support of the Regional Government of Styria - CINE ART
Premiere: Neue Galerie Graz at the Universalmuseum Joanneum

Analog–digital, never you mind. - A lecture-performance is being prepared in a cinema. During the first rehearsal, banter ensues between the technically savvy projectionist and the speaker, a level-headed intellectual. Both have considered their professions carefully and both have good arguments for their respective points of view. Nevertheless, they keep talking past each other …

I have seen the future … deals with the transformation of cinema from analog to digital projection technology, pokes fun at analog nerds, illuminates the often distressing relationship between theory and practice, and satirizes the current trend of lecture-performance in arts-based research. The obsolete film format Maxivision 48 and its militant advocate, the film critic Roger Ebert, are touchpoints for the whole debate.

PALE APRIL

Austria 2016
Director: Karl Wratschko
Music: Maja Osojnik
Producers: Maja Osojnik, Karl Wratschko
Editor: Johannes Gierlinger
Runtime: 6 minutes 20 seconds
Original Format: found footage, b&w
Screening Format: DCP

With the support of the Austrian Music Fund

Premiere: Raum 35, Vienna

A woman on a boat forms the narrative framework of the film. She is drifting on the high seas, alone. Shots of clouds, water and earth, which can be seen as a dream sequence, ensue. Is this a reflection of the emotional world of the woman, traversing myriads of emotions in a brief period of time? Does she wake up from a dream in the end? Whatever else may be true, she remains all alone in the boat — that much is clear.

All the footage in Pale April comes from the Internet. It is distributed on several websites that make films available for non-commercial use. Accordingly, the quality of the footage is far from the usual standard of broadcast-quality footage. However, therein lies the genuine appeal of these sources. Not only are they marked by analog artifacts, but also by countless mutations triggered by permanent data migration. The result of these uncontrollable analog and digital “errors” is an original visual language that speaks volumes about how we deal with historical image sources today.

MONTE NERO

Austria 2014
Director, Producer, Screenwriter, Editor: Karl Wratschko
Cinematographer, Editor: Johannes Gierlinger
Sound Design, Sound: Peter Kutin
Runtime: 6 minutes 6 seconds
Original Format: 16mm, HD, b&w and color
Screening Format: 35mm and DCP

With the support of the Federal Chancellery of Austria, the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna - MA7, and the Regional Government of Styria
Premiere: Changing Perspectives Film Festival, Istanbul
Award: Best Short Film at the Mexico International Film Festival

The experimental film MONTE NERO is an aesthetic reflection in cinematic form dealing with the thematic complex of war and memory. Based on diary recordings from the First World War, MONTE NERO displays technical, aesthetic and media-historical developments in the medium of film over the last hundred years.

The main focus is on changes in cinematic war coverage, especially those resulting from the change from analog to digital image recording. The editing concept behind MONTE NERO follows the metric montage form while borrowing from parallel montage. In contrast to the classical form, the storyline consists exclusively of sequences of black frames. These, contrary to the shorter image segments of the second storyline, become longer and longer as the film progresses. On a linguistic level, narration is developed with the help of a voice-over created using the cut-up technique. Another crucial element of MONTE NERO is the sound design, composed of numerous field recordings from the original locations, combined into a collage-like composition.

Together, these cinematic elements achieve a considerable degree of temporal, spatial and narrative compression. MONTE NERO vividly conveys the thoughts, sufferings and hopes of an ordinary soldier during a war mission to contemporary recipients. From a media-historical point of view, MONTE NERO postulates the thesis that the recording is the decisive factor of a cinematic documentary, regardless of the flaws of whichever medium it is created in.