Olivier Assayas is best known as a filmmaker, yet cinema makes only a late appearance in this volume. A Post-May Adolescence is an account of a personal formation, an initiation into an individual vision of the world. It is, equally, a record of youthful struggle. Assayas' reflective memoir takes the reader from the massive cultural upheaval of France in May 1968 to the mid-1990s, when the artist made his first autobiographical film about his teenage years, L'Eau froide. The movement of thought and creation known as Situationism is the golden thread that connects and, in part, inspires his memoir. This book also includes two essays by Assayas on the aesthetic and political legacy of Guy Debord, who played a decisive role in shaping the author's understanding of the world and his path towards an extremely personal way of making films. A Post-May Adolescence was first published in French in 2005. Its expanded English edition makes a valuable companion to the first English-language monograph on Assayas' body of work, Olivier Assayas, edited by Kent Jones, also published by the Austrian Film Museum.

In summer 1997, French film critic and historian Bernard Eisenschitz met with Robert Kramer three times to speak in detail about Kramer’s life and work, covering thirty years of filmmaking. The exchange between friends starts with his early, activist years and his involvement with the Newsreel Collective, considers essential films like Ice (1969) and Milestones (1975), and traces Kramer’s orientation towards Europe and relocation to France in the late 1970s. Going back and forth between Europe, the USA, Portugal, and Vietnam, Kramer was consistently able to work and make films like Doc’s Kingdom (1987), Route One/USA (1989), and Starting Place (1993). He passed away in 1999.

The conversation was published in French in 2001 as Points de départ. More than 20 years later, Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer makes this illuminating account of a “mid-Atlantic” filmmaker available in its original language for the first time. The book is complemented by three of Kramer’s essays from the 1980s and 1990s and an updated bibliography and filmography.

The speculations of popular cinema are never identical to and never independent from political concepts. Serving as indexes to current and historical power relations, mainstream films propose specific ways of living and dying, of lying and speaking the truth, of forming alliances and negotiating conflict – they "make sense." At the same time, they invite us into a realm of the senses where objects and feelings move to a different drumbeat. In film and politics, agency and insight often rear their heads in unexpected places. As Siegfried Kracauer has observed: "Effects can at any time turn into causes."

In his books and articles, Austrian critic and theorist Drehli Robik has investigated this contested terrain for more than three decades. The depth and esprit of his approach place him in a tradition which Jean-Pierre Gorin has called "the way of the termite" – a mode of thinking that finds unconventional paths towards "White Elephants" and supposedly minor subjects alike. This volume collects some of Robnik's most significant scholarly essays, contributions to pop music magazines and film journals, and samples from his work as a philosophical "edutainer." It draws the map of a cultural-political battleground where Colonel Landa and Private Ryan, Monsieur Hulot and Dr. Strangelove, Barbara Loden's loner and Jordan Peele's collective of "Us" all have their reasons.

A quick succession of changes – some entirely expected, some less so – has drastically reshaped the domain of preserving and exhibiting film heritage in the first two decades of the 21st century. Film production, exhibition, restoration and reflection became predominantly, almost exclusively digital affairs. Professional profiles became obsolete and new ones have emerged. Other forms of art and entertainment took the center stage of collective dreams and discussions. The principles of curatorship clashed with the idea of access. Streaming took over the world as the predominant way of experiencing moving images and private space trumped public space as the primary site of these experiences. Scratches and Glitches is a collection of essays that attempt to make sense of these changes-in-progress in the wider context of cultural history, focusing on the responsibility of film archives and museums, guardians of film heritage.

Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) is internationally recognized as one of the most important painters of the 20th and 21st centuries. The leitmotif of her painting, the act of rendering her “body awareness” visible found additional expression in film in the early 1970s. During her time in New York, Lassnig studied animation at the School of Visual Arts and began to film in 8mm and 16mm. While several of these New York films have long since been part of her canonical works (e.g. Selfportrait, Iris, Couples, Shapes), many remained unfinished. These "films in progress" can be regarded as autobiographical notes as well as an artistic experiment featuring many of Lassnig’s recognizable sujets and methods. In 2018, this filmic legacy was restored and in many cases completed according to Lassnig’s original concept and instructions by two close collaborators, artists Hans Werner Poschauko and Mara Mattuschka, and presented to great international acclaim.

This German-language publication provides the first comprehensive index of Lassnig’s film works, offering insight into the filmmaker’s world of ideas through a wide selection of Lassnig’s own previously unpublished notes. It also includes a selection of Lassnig's "films in progress" on DVD. Two essays by James Boaden and Stefanie Proksch-Weilguni place Lassnig’s work in the context of the US-American film avant-garde of the 1970s, while conversations with Mara Mattuschka, Hans Werner Poschauko and the restoration team shed a light on the rediscovery of Lassnig’s fascinating films.

Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) is internationally recognized as one of the most important painters of the 20th and 21st centuries. The leitmotif of her painting, the act of rendering her “body awareness” visible found additional expression in film in the early 1970s. During her time in New York, Lassnig studied animation at the School of Visual Arts and began to film in 8mm and 16mm. While several of these New York films have long since been part of her canonical works (e.g. Selfportrait, Iris, Couples, Shapes), many remained unfinished. These "films in progress" can be regarded as autobiographical notes as well as an artistic experiment featuring many of Lassnig’s recognizable sujets and methods. In 2018, this filmic legacy was restored and in many cases completed according to Lassnig’s original concept and instructions by two close collaborators, artists Hans Werner Poschauko and Mara Mattuschka, and presented to great international acclaim.

This English-language publication provides the first comprehensive index of Lassnig’s film works, offering insight into the filmmaker’s world of ideas through a wide selection of Lassnig’s own previously unpublished notes. It also includes a selection of Lassnig's "films in progress" on DVD. Two essays by James Boaden and Stefanie Proksch-Weilguni place Lassnig’s work in the context of the US-American film avant-garde of the 1970s, while conversations with Mara Mattuschka, Hans Werner Poschauko and the restoration team shed a light on the rediscovery of Lassnig’s fascinating films.