Page 33 - Studio International - November December 1975

10165-67 -Selbstverstümmelung-Aktion Brus 1965-67 (editing diagram for the film)

With Kren a Jewish child in Holland, it is absurd to eye of God) cannot be so simply explained by its
consider him sharing public responsibility for these evident content. This is simple enough, confronting the
events. At the same time, the mechanisms of spectator with the facts of sexual response to
accommodation are complex. Supported by the strangulation. In turn, both a man and a woman hang
evidence of two of his later films, 20/68 - Schatzi and themselves. The man has an erection and ejaculates
24/70 - Western, which have clear references to images (a normal response in hanging and the basis for a not
of war atrocity, Kren's attitudes and responses are, like
Goya's, ambivalent. There is no simple condemnation
but a seeming search for identification with both victim
and protagonist— in the Brus film, characterized by the
symbol of self-violence. The ambivalence is indicated in a
different way in Schatzi and Western. Schatzi is based
on what is presumably a concentration camp
photograph of a uniformed officer (nationality undefined)
surveying a heap of bodies, and Western on the anti-
Vietnam poster and Babies. In both these films, the
closest Kren comes to a simple political content and
direct reference to this underlying element of his
imagery, the recognition of the image is withheld. In the
earlier film this is done by the superimposition of negative
and positive, making an almost undifferentiated grey
surface, and in Western by an exploration of the poster in
such extreme close-up that it is again the surface rather
than the 'message' which forms the dominant experience.
The ambivalence — first choosing the material for its
connotations, then denying simple interpretation by
withholding early or, at any stage, certain recognition —
is evident through the irony of a 'formalist' presentation
of emotionally loaded images. At the same time, the
irony is not a satire : it is a device for confronting the
viewer with a complex response even where simple
condemnation would otherwise suggest itself as a
self-evident reaction.
Another aspect of Kren's later work which extends his
involvement in the direction he shared with the Direct
Art movement can be seen in two other films, one of
which, at least, displays a similar psychological
ambivalence. They are both concerned with the
existential question of bodily function. The first of these,
16/67-20 September, is a relatively simple didactic work
using rapid interchanging montage to establish an
experiential link between the acts of pissing and
drinking, and shitting and eating. But the more recent
26171 — Balzac und das Auge Gottes (Balzac and the 26/71-Balzac und das Auge Gottes 1971
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