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Arnulf Rainer
In 1960, Peter Kubelka put the finishing touches to his film Arnulf Rainer, today still a landmark in the history of cinema. In this radical work, Kubelka reduced cinema to its simplest form of expression: each frame is composed of light or darkness, silence or sound.
Without filming any images at all, while drawing attention to the fundamental characteristics of the film apparatus, Kubelka succeeded in creating, in the screening room, an event at once exhilarating and contemplative, whose beauty and power conjure up thunder, lightning, or the succession of day and night. Arnulf Rainer is a ‘flicker film’ which alternates black and clear projected film to create a stroboscopic effect.
Bio Peter Kubelka
Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka (1934) is also a musician and an architect. In the 1970s, he designed the Anthology Film Archives, a screening space in New York. Its design befits the purist aesthetic of the avant-garde film movement of that era. His short 16 mm films experiment by linking seemingly disparate sounds and images. His metric films Adebar (1957), Schwechater (1958), and Arnulf Rainer (1960) were released when structural film became internationally renowned. He is best known for his 1966 avant-garde classic Unsere Afrikareise.
In the creation of the sound film named after the Viennese artist Arnulf Rainer, Peter Kubelka used four strips of different material: blank film, black film, perforated magnetic tape with recorded white noise, and blank perforated magnetic tape. Thus, the film consists of the four different elements of light, darkness, noise, and silence, and these are audiovisual correspondences, given that white noise, like white light, contains all of the frequency components of the spectrum with a constantly even amplitude. Like the motion picture, the film’s sound exists in its two extremes. Presence and absence in stroboscopic alternation substitute for the representational function of the film and transform it into an event. In the process, the illusion of cinematographic motion is made visible: the interpolation of the eye between the flashing frames as a condition for the fusion of the individual images into a continuous movement. This physiological sensory process usually goes unnoticed, but given contrastive alternating stimuli is now experienced in the form of afterimages on the retina.
With Arnulf Rainer, his third metrical film, Peter Kubelka arrived at the most elemental components of cinematography—namely light, absence of light, sound, silence. These are the four poles from which all of cinema, all of film, is suspended. Stretched to their utmost limits, all illusionism is driven out. The last trace of a spatial reproduction is extinguished. And the illusion of movement based on visual similarities of sequential frames (whose minor differences disappear upon projection, and thanks to the sluggishness of perception, are transformed into an illusion of continuity) is also obliterated.
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- This film was #78 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025