Stones

Steine (Stones) is a documentary film on a sculptor’s symposium in St. Margarethen, Burgenland. Behind this short description of content lies one of the most intelligently filmed and concepted documentary films in the history of Austrian film. The date of the last showing of this film could not be reconstructed.
Through examining another type of art - sculpture - Schmidt begins his discourse on the art of film. The macro-structure is conventional: journey, arrival, an official tour, the subjects nature and culture, the artists at work, a "dialogue" with the individual pieces, and finally the dialogue between film and stone. Along with its documentary ambitions, the film poses the explicit question on what the mimetic function of art is (...). Schmidt leaves being abstract up to the sculptors in the film, while he himself remains in a representational mode. The question of Schmidt's film is: "How to represent?" The function of depictionary representation has still been assigned to this film, it has not yet (as in Schmidt's later films) become material in itself. (Peter Tscherkassy in: (eds.) Horwath/Ponger/Schlemmer, Avantgardefilm Österreich. 1950 bis heute, Vienna 1995)