Schwechater

Schwechater (1958)

In 1957, Peter Kubelka was hired to make a short commercial for Schwechater beer. The beer company undoubtedly thought they were commissioning a film that would help them sell their beers; Kubelka had other ideas. He shot his film with a camera that did not even have a viewer, simply pointing it in the general direction of the action. He then took many months to edit his footage, while the company fumed and demanded a finished product. Finally he submitted a film, 90 seconds long, that featured extremely rapid cutting (cutting at the limits of most viewers' perception) between images washed out almost to the point of abstraction — in black-and-white positive and negative and with red tint — of dimly visible people drinking beer and of the froth of beer seen in a fully abstract pattern.

Date of release
1958-01-01
TMDB
4.9 / 10 (54)
Runtime
2m
Director
Peter Kubelka

Interesting facts

Schwechater is a 1958 experimental short film by Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka. It is the second entry in his trilogy of metrical films, between Adebar and Arnulf Rainer.

Production

The Schwechater Bier brewery commissioned Kubelka to make an advertisement for its beer. Kubelka shot using an old, hand-operated 35 mm scientific camera. The camera had no viewfinder, and Kubelka largely ignored the composition of the images. Once the film stock was used up, Kubelka humored the art director for Schwechater Bier and cranked the empty camera, pretending to continue filming.

Kubelka used four shots spanning 16, 30, 90, and 1,440 frames as the material for Schwechater. He produced high-contrast positive and negative prints, copied so that each shot looped for exactly 1,440 frames. After getting the developed film from the laboratory, Kubelka let it sit for six weeks until executives from Schwechater Bier began asking about the commercial.

The editing process for Schwechater lasted six months. Kubelka produced a score for the film with a complex system of overlapping structures to determine how to combine the eight film strips. One such structure specifies outlines the gradual permeation of the colour red in Schwechater.

Another structure specifies which frames do and do not contain images. Each sequence of frames with images is immediately followed by a sequence of the same length containing frames showing a solid color—either black or red. The frame count of these sequences traverses the powers of two, from 1 up to 32 and back down.

For the film's soundtrack, Kubelka created a score of rasping sounds and beeps. The intermittent periods of sound happen parallel to the red-tinted sequences, with a low hum and one to three sine tones. When the Schwechater logo appears at the end of the film, Kubelka used a sustained, high-pitched sine tone.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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