41/82 Getting warm
The third of the series of "bad home movies." Kren moved with his Thunderbird from winter-like New England to warm Texas. One part of the film was filmed in Austin.
"Daniel [Plunkett] in Austin told me to come to Texas. My car broke down in Littlerock...it was fucked! I got ripped off...fucking Littlerock...shit!! (laughter) Anyway, there was a woman there, she took care of me and I eventually got my money back and made it to Austin."
(Interview by Andre Stitt, quoted in: Hans Scheugl: "Die Filme. Eine kommentierte Filmographie," in: (ed.) Scheugl Ex Underground Kurt Kren. Seine Filme, Vienna 1996)
Getting warm begins with a leader countdown ending in a small fire. The picturing then proceeds with building a house, lying on a bed before a TV, a grocery store day and night, a car being towed away, the Salvation Army, Winchell´s Donuts, an unemployment line, more day labor... - all acts of getting warm, staying warm, staying alive. One also thinks of the colloquial sense of you´re getting warm meaning you´re getting closer, echoing the search implied in Which Way to CA?
In these latest, post-structuralist films, Kren allows the individual images, the signs, to come forward, with less apparent manipulation. They are composed (quoted) and then combined in ways that lead us to question them as presentations.
(...) He appropriates already-existing systems of signs in order to reveal certain conceptual assumptions and perceptual blocks through subtle manipulation of these signs. In the process, he takes pleasure in making something which both represents and is.
(David Levi Strauss, "Notes on Kren: Cutting Through Structural Materialism or, `Sorry. It had to be done.´," in: Cinematograph I, San Francisco 1985)
Michael Palm zu 41/82 Getting Warm von Kurt Kren
In der Aneinanderreihung einzelner Stationen läßt sich auch kaum Ordnung machen. So gesehen haben Krens amerikanische Arbeiten eigentlich keinen Anfang und kein Ende mehr, und das einzige Prinzip, dem die Bilder folgen, ist deren Versammeltsein auf einer einzigen Ebene, die da heißen könnte: wenn die chronologische Zeit Pause macht. Zumal Kren auch hier auf räumliche Zusammenhänge pfeift, erfahren die einzelnen Bilder eine Entdifferenzierung im Bilderfluß, und genau diese Entkoppelung der Bewegungsbilder voneinander ist es, die ein Davor und Danach ausklammert.
(Michael Palm: Which Way?, Drei Pfade durchs Bild-Gebüsch von Kurt Kren, in: Hans Scheugl (Hrsg.), Ex Underground Kurt Kren. Seine Filme, Wien 1996)