20 LITTLE FILMS
Each year since 1995, the Viennale has asked a great, international director to make his or her own personal contribution to the festival: a contribution in the form of a small, approximately one-minute film, which, like a trailer, is used as a kind of introduction to the festival. But the idea isn’t a trailer in the strict sense of the word – no conventional advertising or opening credits for the festival. The concept is more to create a short, autonomous work, a cinematic moment that stands alone and for nothing and no-one else. It’s a kind of bet the festival makes that has no restrictions in terms of form, contents or aesthetics. Over the years this has resulted in a series of absolutely unique, exceptional works: a series full of surprises, breaks, peculiarities and rhythms. Directors who have previously accepted our invitation to make a trailer for the Viennale include many great names such as Stan Brakhage, Agnès Varda, Jonas Mekas, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch. Each of them has created his/her own cinematic world between home movie and political essay, music film and minimal étude, mysterious story and radical, aesthetic abstraction. They are, as Jonas Mekas once remarked, not trailers, but “real little films.” This series of “little films” by directors from Bruce Baillie to Chris Marker and James Benning to Leos Carax will now be shown together for the first time on the occasion of the Viennale’s great 50th anniversary, premiering at the Locarno Film Festival.
20 LITTLE FILMS
1995 - 2012
Austria
26 min
Chris Marker
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Agnès Varda
Peter Tscherkassky
Matthias Müller
Jonas Mekas
David Lynch
Ken Jacobs
Jean-Luc Godard
Ernie Gehr
Gustav Deutsch
Jem Cohen
Leos Carax
Stan Brakhage
James Benning
Bruce Baillie
Martin Arnold
Trailer
No Dialogue