Positioning Moucle Blackout’s cinematic work in the context of Austrian and international art and avant-garde film history also means having to describe a series of thwarted opportunities. As early as the mid-1950s, a number of artists in Vienna began to engage with the medium of film in a radically independent way; at around the same time, the first literary actions of the Vienna Group were taking place. In the ten years that followed – unlike, for example, in the USA at the same time – in Austria it was only male artists who were active in these groups: the filmmakers Herbert Vesely, Peter Kubelka, Ferry Radax, Marc Adrian, and Kurt Kren, as well as the writers H. C. Artmann, Friedrich Achleitner, Gerhard Rühm, and Oswald Wiener.But even as a young student of sculpture and design, Christiane Engländer was a frequent visitor to these events and soon became a good friend of some of the protagonists. She formed a partnership with and was later married to Marc Adrian, with whom she collaborated as a camerawoman and editor from 1965 onwards, and he in turn for some of her works on the optical printer. And she shared the search for a multidisciplinary form of artistic expression, was enthusiastic about Op Art and kinetics, and in addition, studied in Paris from 1957 to 1958 at the IDHEC, the French film school. Her initial independent attempts at filmmaking have been lost, and so the first entry in her filmography is Walk in (1969), based on a strictly structural principle. (Brigitta Burger-Utzer)

"I didn't want to make work like other people. Not because I didn't like their results, but because my ideas concerned other matters. For me, film was a medium I could use to go further. I wanted the films to remain open to interpretation, but not too easy to decipher. So, the viewer can mentally engage with the work and reach their own conclusion. It is not about serving the audience things ready made – this never interested me." (Moucle Blackout in discussion with Michaela Grill and Isabella Reicher)