Cave Painting (Siegfried A. Fruhauf, 2023) (Patreon)

A bit of context for the uninitiated. Siegfried Fruhauf might best be characterized as a B-player in the contemporary Austrian avant-garde. I wouldn't call him an "also-ran," exactly, and most of the films of his I've seen have been passable enough programmers, short works that would fit comfortably within most experimental film showcases. They are diverting enough while they're in front of you, and don't leave a terrible taste in your mouth. I've seen eight of Fruhauf's films at this point, and my favorite is probably his 2022 Covid-related Distance Film, which uses stop-motion close-ups of a meter stick to remind the audience exactly how far to stay away from others during the pandemic.

Anyway, if Peter Kubelka, Kurt Kren, and Valie Export represent the historical foundation of Viennese experimentalism, and Peter Tscherkassky, Martin Arnold, and to a lesser extent Gustav Deutsch are the most accomplished keepers of the flame, then Fruhauf belongs to a secondary echelon of professional structuralists, along with Dietmar Brehm, Lisl Ponger, Norbert Pfaffenbichler, and a few others. They are all distributed by Sixpack, the Austrian film cooperative, and most of these filmmakers receive fairly generous funding from the Austrian Department of Art, Culture, and Sport. Make no mistake, securing that federal bag is not an automatic formula for uninspired filmmaking. But it does insure that these makers can have fairly stable careers.

Cave Painting, Fruhauf's latest work, premiered back in January at the IFFR. It is a terrible film, far worse than the artist's previously middling output. And I would not bother dissecting it were it not for my nagging intuition that Cave Painting represents a lot of what is wrong with contemporary experimental cinema. It pulses and flickers, providing a rapid-fire set of "materialist" images, ranging from  dark leader with nicks and scratches, to dark frames with painterly swaths of emulsion removed, producing sharp white stripes of projector light. In between, Fruhauf provides randomly assembled two- to three-frame images of rocky surfaces, with brown clay and greenish lichens, the titular "cave" motif. And for what seems like minutes on end, Cave Painting features dancing handprints on the "cave" walls, suggesting either primitive man (indexical human history!) or lax security at Lescaux (the oily hands of tourists).

There is no discernible structure to Cave Painting. It moves from one visual idea to the next with no real development, no underlying compositional logic. It is just a nonstop sensation of images replacing other images, with one key organizational maneuver. If you watch Cave Painting very slowly, you can see exactly what Fruhauf is up to. A frame (scratches, surfaces, muted colors, what have you) appears on screen. In a half a second, that image is digitally enlarged, bringing it "closer" to the viewer. It is then replaced with another bit of empty signification, which also comes at you, and on and on. So Fruhauf is articulating two simultaneous but seemingly opposed forms of motion: the rapid shift from one frame to the next, and the "warp speed" sensation of everything on screen flying at your eyes.

Although Fruhauf generally collates the frames into groups, based on similar characteristics, they don't have much concrete relationship in terms of shape or texture. However, the human eye being what it is, we tend to perceive each new picture as replacing the next in an animated sequence. There's nothing but lines and forms, so even though they are wildly dissimilar, we register them as moving forms, jagged and electrified, performing a kind of St. Vitus dance across the screen. And since the images are also making their truncated little journey across the Z-axis, Cave Painting seems like a nonstop whirligig of kinetic abstraction.

Ain't it cool? Although I do think that Cave Painting is a lazy, poorly wrought piece of cinema, I realized that it is indicative of a larger problem. Kubelka, Kren, and others of their generation had a modernist mission. They were conducting an inquiry. They wanted to understand what cinema actually was, and to some extent they wanted to destroy it, at least as it was commonly (mis)understood. But now, "structuralism" is just another style, one that offers as much instant gratification as a lowbrow comedy but also bears the non-representational imprimatur of fine art. These "moves" signify nothing: no philosophy, no aesthetic orientation, and certainly no attitude toward the spectator other than an ingratiating desire to catch your glance in a  YouTube thumbnail. Cave Painting tells me that we are no more than two years out from a "flicker filter" on TikTok. In other words, we're fucked.