Monday night Meadows hosted the first of seven Avant Garde film screenings as part of this semester-long event The Taste Series.

This event will focus on New York filmmakers who participated in the movement that was taking place from around 1950-80, showing films exclusively on 16mm prints on loan from The Film-Makers’ Cooperative in NYC. 

Monday’s screening focused on the work of Peter Kubelka from 1955-65, beginning with what is considered his most complex film “Unsere Afrikareise” (Our trip to Africa) and ending with his first, plot-driven film “Mosaik Im Vertrauen.” A still-living Austrian filmmaker, Kubelka is the only artist who is not American that will be featured in the screenings. 

Kubelka was notorious for being hired for projects, and then running off with the film to work on his own project. He focused on creating something that was an overall aesthetically and psychologically stimulating product. 

One of the films shown was “Arnulf Rainier” (1960) was commissioned by its namesake and was one of the self-indulgent projects Kubelka used the given tape for. This ‘flicker film’, one of his most well-known, is made solely of black and white frames, which Kubelka strings together at different intervals.

Another of the films that Kubelka was commissioned for, yet completed his own project instead was a commercial for a beer called Schwechater. Kubelka plays with shot lengths and contrast, showing how much meaning can be applied in the editing of a film. As a note of interest, the beer company confiscated the film after Kubelka showed it to them, saying they would not run the commercial – the next day, he broke into their office and stole the tape back.

The longest film of the night was “Mosaik Im Vertrauen,” running only 16 minutes long.  Overall the experience at these film screenings focused on education and experiencing a new art.