100 Jahre Kino. Illusion - Emotion - Realität. Die 7. Kunst auf der Suche nach …

On December 28, 1895, the Lumière brothers sent out invitations for the first film presentation in a Parisian café; 100 years later, the Kunsthaus welcomes visitors to an exhibition which – as we see from its epic but clumsy title – is searching for the unlimited. Who apart from the confessed cinephile and film-roll collector Harald Szeemann would have been able to tackle such a titanic enterprise? In his own words, he was aiming at ‘a visualization of film history, so to speak, from the standpoint of the total work of art.’ Urged on by the Council of Europe and in collaboration with the ICFT, a UNESCO organization for audiovisual heritage, the touring exhibition should have been shown first as part of the Venice Biennale. But in the end, it had its premiere in Zurich. After viewing hundreds of films, Szeemann and his co-worker, Tobia Bezzola and Christian Dominguez, defined film-immanent themes such as heroes, violence, taboos, the erotic, music, light and movement. According to Szeemann this was a deliberately subjective selection, a homage to the creative achievement of film makers. A slogan for the exhibition was: ‘Projection is Queen,’ and so film cuts from about 300 films were sought in the Cinémathèque Suisse in Lausanne. Swiss Television copied them onto the then very new laser disks, so as to show them with video projectors. These determined the exhibition architecture. There were 24 individual projection cubicles, each devoted to one epoch, one genre or a single director. The curators sought further corresponding artworks by association. They were mainly found in the Kunsthaus collection, as works by Balla, Beuys, Duchamp, Giacometti, Goya, Hodler, Magritte or Valloton demonstrate. But cinema-related works by Cindy Sherman, Peter Fischli/David Weiss and H.R. Giger were also seen as loans. The media response was very broad. The wealth of what was on offer enthused the journalistic essayists: It was said that the show made cinema attractive. With regard to the selection of films, however, the exhibition was judged in two quite different ways. Cathérine Silberschmidt complained with justice that not enough films by female directors had been considered (WOZ Die Wochenzeitung). More generally criticized was the mediocre technical quality of the film cuts that were played, and regarding the intended dialog of the arts, Bettina Schultes brought it to a fine point: ‘Relationships between the arts were referenced without being taken to any depth.’ (Badische Zeitung). A flyer with a list of works came with the exhibition, but no catalogue was published.