The label was founded in 2004. Its aim was to make available, for private use, hard to find works. Similar to a small publishing house for quality literature, INDEX releases and distributes audiovisual publications relevant to the history of international and Austrian film, video and media art. So far 32 DVDs (no regional code, PAL format), with their excellent visual and audio quality, have been published. The Edition´s main focus is the work of singular Austrian artists, but the programme is gradually expanded to international artists and their works.

001

Kurt Kren´s Action films are the most tangible way of comprehending the nature of Actionist works of art and events today. I´am not referring to the recognizability of an action´s dramaturgical details, but rather to the fact that Kren´s Action films make it possible to immerse oneself into their structural essence so as to grasp their energetic and aesthetic meaning.

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Catalog: 001

002

Kurt Kren´s achievements with regard to the montage of short cuts in his early works was many years ahead of the rest of the (film)world, in both form and content. Kurt Kren was a pioneere: an avantgardist in the classic and best sense of the word. A filmmaker who knows how to think in images like few others in this trade, and who realized these images in films that are among the »most beautiful« and »most important« in cinematic history.

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Catalog: 002

003

Employing monumental projected images and bludgeoning sound environments, the multimedia installations of Kurt Hentschläger and Ulf Langheinrich mark a new stage in the esthetic of sensory overload.

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Catalog: 003

004

Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT has been an influential and provocative figure on the international art scene for over three decades. Her practice includes film, video, photography, text and performance. Initially expanding the Actionist project to confront a complex feminist critique of the social and political body, her works achieve a compelling fusion of the visceral and the conceptual.

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Catalog: 004

005

Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid are major figures of Slovenian video art. Their political art attacks the multilayered root of the videographic medium and its relation to mass media. Using cross references from cinema, literature, theatre, visual arts and philosophy, they mobilize a vast cultural reservoir, which they re-read within the social and political reality of post-socialism. In their work transvestism becomes a linguistic strategy. Gržinić´s and Šmid´s works demonstrate that post-communist disillusionment may give birth to an extraordinary dynamism of resistance.

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Catalog: 005

006

In this broad sampling of works, Bulgarian-born, Vienna-based Mara Mattuschka playfully moves through motherhood to monster flicks ­ where an alien, out on the town, wreaks havoc of epic proportions. Androgynous star Mimi Minus infuses mischievous humor and strange wisdom into the existence of Mattuschka´s characters.

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Catalog: 006

007

A quaint and grandiose series of short reportage ­ Volks stöhnende Knochenschau ­ produced in 1980 by video artists from the inner and outer circle of the Medienwerkstatt Wien, a time shift into another world.

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Catalog: 007

008

A confrontation with the codes of narrative-representational cinema is one of Peter Tscherkassky´s constant concerns. If one attempts to distill a constant from his films, then this must surely be the oscillation between the abstract and the concrete, between the dry and the sensual, which is the source of energy of his work. The question of belly or brain is one which Tscherkassky stopped asking long ago - for ultimately sobriety is the route to ecstasy.

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Catalog: 008

009

Constanze Ruhm´s computer animations and films, of which a selection is presented in the framework of this edition, range between architecture, narration and performance, and investigate interrelations between the languages of cinema and new media. By short-circuiting the blank spaces between distinct contemporary »scripts«, they deal with issues of identity and representation in order to develop from there a new syntax for present-day forms of representation and media narratives.

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Catalog: 009

010

Lisl Ponger´s photographic and cinematic work investigates the circumstances of places and their territorial occupation by the camera, the acquisation of images, the function of photographic and cinematic representation, and the presentation of cultural values. Her works are characterized by that which is no longer present, which refers to that which is already absent. This is a latent component of each of her images and at the same time the particular political stance of her works.

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Catalog: 010

011

With his sensitive awareness, Neuwirth, got hold of dream-like pictures, which in his words, he allows to clatter, make loud noises, hum, thunder and sing.

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Catalog: 011

012

It is, in a word, glorious.... what I feel is the inherent power and mystery of such material, the arrangement of these images and sounds into a definition of cinema constitutes one of the greatest pedagogic films I have seen.... my main reaction is to have my socks knocked off.

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Catalog: 012

013

With her characteristic consistency Gertrude Moser-Wagner has viewed her work as a sculptress in the conceptual tradition ­ even at a time when other approaches were more in the limelight. She uses very precise artistic stategies, such as the transferral from one context to another, the strategy of declaring something-to-be-art, of making the spectator aware of processes, changes over the time or the ambiguity of objects and shapes.

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Catalog: 013

014

A DVD release celebrating the extraordinary young video and electronic music scene in Austria. These are radical avant-garde works that emerge logically from modern electronic music. The images sometimes tie in with the earliest pure abstract avant-garde films, but reveal themselves in everything to be exponents of contemporary digital technology.

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Catalog: 014

015

In Oliver Ressler´s works art becomes a political position.

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Catalog: 015

016

The moods of his films resemble an atmosphere between the dream and trauma. Brehm treats the dream as a source of strategies for association, similar to the secondary process to which according to Freud all the workings of the unconscious are subject. Dietmar Brehm ­ a master of the grammar of a non-conceptual language.

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Catalog: 016

017

The subversive, ironic analysis of systems of social control; pseudo-scientific technical experiments, for example with objects of daily use; and the »manipulation« of our visual habits with the help of technical apparatus ­ these are central aspects of artistic work of Leo Schatzl.

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Catalog: 017

018

The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.

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Catalog: 018

019

Of course Peters the filmmaker blurs the individual of the same name with his dense textual and visual system of symbols to create something else: Jan Peters the fictional character.

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Catalog: 019

020

What does it mean to recognize a documentary gesture in Kren´s films? What is being documented? The documentary images that Kren uses in his works do not arise out of a plan, but instead, come from the right moment, a coincidence, a momentary observation, or a seized opportunity.

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Catalog: 020

021

Anna, an artist, is obsessed with the invasion of alien doubles bent on total destruction. Her schizophrenia is reflected in the juxtapositions of long movie camera takes with violently edited montages: private with public spaces; black & white with colour, still photographs with video, earsplitting sounds with disruptive camera angles. Anna uses her body like a map; after a devastating quarrel with her lover, she paints red stitches on herself. Watching their scenes together, we realize how seldom, if ever before, the details of sexual intimacy have been shown in film from the point of view from a woman. Export privileges rupture over unity and never settles for one-dimensional solutions.

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Catalog: 021

022

Józef Robakowski is one of the most famous Polish artists and filmmakers associated with the neo-avant-garde movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His works are characterized by a marked tendency to transgress various genres and media.

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Catalog: 022

023

In the 1960s and 1970s actionism and happenings provided a foundation for performance art, the exceptional form in which women are as numerous but more recognized as men. Three generations of artists set out in As She Likes It to formulate a statement on our times, using the expressive power of voice and body,
dispensing with exclusion of the male world more self-confidently than in the early years.

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Catalog: 023

024

Peter Weibel´s (earlier works) (...) belong to the heroic years of a period of upheaval in which everything seemed possible in art. However, the artist not only made his appearance as a critic of public media but took the opportunity of presenting his own themes.

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Catalog: 024

025

One of the traditional tasks of the film avant-garde is to show what cinema is capable of when it is released from literary stories, from narration: how to interweave seemingly unrelated pictures, how to convert outer and inner spaces into a synthetic, unrealistic third cinematic space. Linda Christanell´s works are a study of such a space. In the confrontation, in its layering, the material is subjected to an endurance test.

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Catalog: 025

026

These shorts, executed between 1984 and 1986 in Vienna, exude an amazingly fresh intimacy and vitality. Referred to by the filmmakers as »home movies«, they record actionistic performances in the directors´ own living quarters, with added soundtracks of intermittent percussive sounds.

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Catalog: 026

027

Whether he is working in the so-called documentary or so-called fictional mode, with 16mm, 35mm or high-8-video: for Pilz the central issue is our perception and the film or video is a disposition, a condition for the temporal and spatial organization of a reflection. This refers in the first instance to the mere listening and observing, but also to an intuitive sense for encounters with people, for their ways of dealing with the space within which they move and the things that surround them. This sense of perception permeates his entire work.

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Catalog: 027

028

Ivan Ladislav Galeta from Zagreb is the neo-Platonist among European experimental film directors. Galeta hides a true chamber of wonders behind the clear, mathematically abstract structure of his films and videos, meticulously compiled rhythmically frame for frame, each work likewise presenting an analysis of the film medium. Concealed therein, culled from deep in the medium´s prehistory, are hermetic parallel universes in whose number ranges and symbolic spaces, Galeta´s precisely constructed film compositions find a formalist anchor.

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Catalog: 028

029

All of the films collected on this DVD have in common a focused and precise observation of spatial structures. Whether interiors, spaces that have to do with the material or cinematic spaces, whether the city of Calcutta or specific places in Vienna: Scheugl follows not only a precise plan, but also a linear - albeit not causal - logic of narration, which is based on a simple chronological progression "one thing after another".

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Catalog: 029

030

Notes on Marie Menken explores the almost forgotten story of the legendary artist Marie Menken (1909-1970) who became one of New York´s outstanding underground experimental filmmakers of the 1940s through the 1960s, inspiring artists such as Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, and Gerard Malanga. She was a probable role model of Edward Albee´s "Who´s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and ended up as a Warhol Superstar. The documentary allows a glimpse into her social and artistic struggle and radical integrity, drawing the picture of a modern myth in personal diary style.

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Catalog: 030

031

Flaming Ears is a pop sci-fi lesbian fantasy feature set in the year 2700 in the fictive burnt out city of Asche. It follows the tangled lives of three woman: Sy, comic book artist; Volly, a performance artist and sexed up pyromaniac; and Nun, an amoral alien with predilection for reptiles. It´s a story of love and revenge, and an antiromantic plea for love in its many forms. It´s also a story laced with sex, violence and a pulsating soundtrack, a cyberdyke movie, stimulating both the body and the brain.

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Catalog: 031

032

Nowhere else is talk of the »panoptic era«­ an eye that sees everything yet remains elusive ­ clearer than in the medium that has taken omnipresence and fleetingness to a global scale: the Internet. On the Internet, the paradigm known thus far for our imaging apparatus has become invalid: there is no longer a single, central perspective, but instead, a myriad of viewing angles that broadcast over webcams, pumping incessant images into the digital data stream. The »vacuum« in the title of Dariusz Kowalski´s cinematic essay, which follows his earlier works Elements and Luukkaankangas, is therefore not a void, but a powerful generator, an unremitting doubling of the world: in image.

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Catalog: 032

033

Lassnig trained at the academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and then spent several years in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, where she was exposed to Art Informel and Surrealism. From 1968 to 1980, she lived in New York, where she did pioneering work in film, producing a series of remarkably inventive animations all presented by INDEX for the first time on DVD.

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Catalog: 033

034

This compilation offers an opportunity for a substantial view of Austrian experimental and documentary film´s varied status quo. The works on this DVD range from subjective to rigidly structural documentary approaches, from abstract music videos and conceptual architectural studies to elaborate computer animations. The amount of formal innovation manifest in all these films and videos is outstanding.

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Catalog: 034