Los Angeles premieres!
Philipp Fleischmann in person!

One of the world’s most singular film artists, Philipp Fleischmann has, over the past decade, quietly forged one of the most unique projects in contemporary cinema. Since 2013, the Austrian filmmaker has taken as his primary subject institutional spaces of a certain cultural-historical significance. But rather than merely record or reflect on these spaces—which have ranged from Vienna’s Secession Building (Main Hall, 2013) to a hallowed theater at the Austrian Filmmuseum (The Invisible Cinema 3, 2018)—Fleischmann instead utilizes his films as ideological tools to mediate and comment on the finer points of each institution’s art-historical legacy. His highly unique process, in which the light and spatial coordinates of a given location are inscribed on strips of 35mm film through the direct exposure of hand-built, site-specific cameras, turns the cinematic apparatus itself into a kind of critical-conceptual conduit. At their best, Fleischmann’s films act as a both a spatiotemporal intervention and an implicit statement about the value institutions place on cinema.

Tonight’s three-part program will include the majority of Fleischmann’s films made for the cinema to date, a trio of complementary works by three of the artist’s contemporaries (Johann Lurf, Björn Kämmerer, and Viktoria Schmid) who take up a similar structural-materialist impulse, as well as a live 16mm performance in which
Fleischmann will hand-project a selection of classic Austrian expanded cinema pieces.

as well as a live 16mm performance in which Fleischmann will hand-project a selection of classic Austrian expanded cinema pieces by Valie Export, Hans Scheugl, and Peter Weibel.

Full program details and film descriptions available at: https://www.acropoliscinema.com/items/philippfleischmann