23/69: Underground Explosion

Kurt Kren was an Austrian filmmaker of some real talent who never quite pulled off a significant film. His frame compositions are often excellent, and he manages to do much with cheap equipment and no discernible production budget. Kren's major failure is an inability or an unwillingness to join his compositions into a coherent narrative. As with Eisenstein (at the start of his career) and some of the other early Russian filmmakers, Kren seems to feel that merely amassing several minutes' worth of unusual images will constitute an interesting film, when in fact the result is more like a photo album than a movie. Eisenstein eventually developed his narrative skills to the level of his visual talents; Kren never managed to do this.

One distinctive trait of Kren's films is his method of numbering and dating their titles. This one is cried '23/69: Underground Explosion'. That means it's Kren's 23rd film, completed in 1969, with 'Underground Explosion' as the actual title. Kren's system is not only distinctive; it also makes a lot of sense, as archivists can easily sequence and date his films, whilst his titles also tend to be descriptive.

Here we have a five-minute, thirty-second film about an avant-garde performance troupe touring Germany, Austria and Switzerland. There's no dialogue, so there's no language barrier. Unfortunately, the lack of dialogue calls attention to the fact that this is basically a home movie, not a documentary. Kren shows no interest in (or no ability for) shaping his footage to make a point or convey information: he's basically just showing us some of the things that his troupe experienced.

Much of this movie seems to have been filmed with the camera at crotch level, which I don't think is meant as a sexual comment. Kren just seems to be striving for a distinctive camera angle. He's found it, but to no particular purpose. There's a reason for conventional film-making techniques: most of the time, the tried and true methods of telling a story on film really *are* the best methods. Kren seems to want to tell stories in an unusual way, but hasn't bothered to come up with stories that demand unusual narrative techniques.

I'll rate '23/69: Underground Explosion' 5 out of 10, because it's interesting to look at for the few minutes of its running time. If Kren had continued this camera technique in a longer film, it would have worn out its welcome.