‘Schwechater’: Peter Kubelka’s experimental beer commercial
Austrian director Peter Kubelka is revered in the world of avant-garde cinema for his incredibly innovative approach to editing, creating a unique balance between darkness and light to arrive at an original conceptualisation of the medium. Incorporating meticulously edited visual spectacles and strange soundscapes, Kubelka’s relatively small oeuvre shaped the landscape of both the American avant-garde movement as well as European experimental cinema.
Among the most interesting additions to Kubelka’s filmography are the projects he accepted from certain companies, initially being hired to make commercials but completely negating the job description. Titled Schwechater (named after the eponymous brewery), his 1958 experimental film completely eschewed the rigid capitalist modifications of advertisements by constructing a fluid, constantly shifting examination of the cinematic image itself.
In an interview with Electric Sheep Magazine, Kubelka said: “I consider my position towards the commercial side of cinema, and by that, I mean commercially produced films and the industry around it, as that of a parasite… I accepted commissions but then didn’t really execute them in the way that those who paid for them had anticipated. But what gave me the moral assurance that I was right was to believe that I gave them something that was much better than what they really wanted. So when I worked in the 50s, I had that same attitude.”
He added: “I was sued, and I had to leave the country. I went to Sweden and worked as a dishwasher, and god knows what else. It was the only way for me to survive. Schwechater was very influential, so I couldn’t stay and work in Vienna. Even the film lab would no longer do prints for me because Schwechater was their client, and they would tell me: ‘They pay us a lot of money every month, and you are nothing. You just create problems because your films are so difficult to print with a thousand cuts in one minute, so go away.'”
Containing exactly 1440 frames, Schwechater launches an interesting conversation with the foundational concept of film editing by cutting between the images in such a way that the cuts themselves dissolve. Filmed with an old 35mm scientific camera, it took almost half a year for the editing process to conclude, and the result was truly striking. A resilient response to the totalising logic of capital, Kubelka’s commercial belongs to the same canon as Jean-Luc Godard’s Schick advert.
Although it is seen as an important stepping stone in the history of experimental cinema now, Schwechater almost ended Kubelka’s career. After being sued by the company and damaging both his professional as well as his social connections, Kubelka decided to leave the country, and Schwechater played a huge role in that decision. Fortunately, the Austrian director’s work actually garnered widespread acclaim in the US, so much so that the company reportedly ended up requesting Kubelka for another print of the commercial years later.
Watch the film below.
