Co-presented with Anthology Film Archives

The first comprehensive U.S. retrospective to explore Austrian, Cologne- and Graz-based filmmaker Lukas Marxt’s work. With the filmmaker in person!

An arctic landscape like an etching or a photo negative: silver-grey, mirror-smooth sea, in the background a black mountain range criss-crossed by snowdrifts. After a few minutes, a radio call is made to a boatman to launch his Zodiac into the frame and turn an ever-widening circle, creating a spiral of water as performative, fleeting land art. Later, the film artist will take up this motif of a spiral again featuring a car in the Mojave Desert.

Lukas Marxt, born in Austria in 1983, conceives of landscapes as sculptural objects or projection surfaces to which he inscribes a temporal dimension. Sometimes he intervenes in the image, as in the works described above, while in other videos the experience of time is only slowly manifested in weather phenomena and changing light moods. His work with sound (often in congenial collaboration with the electronic artist Jung an Tagen) is just as important as his work on the image in achieving the experience of “deep time.”

Marxt is fundamentally interested in the interplay of landscape and the traces of human presence it displays; following a series shot in the Arctic, he has in more recent years focused on filming around the Salton Sea and California’s Imperial Valley, investigating socio-cultural and ecological inscriptions in the landscape. Most recently, Marxt and his partner Vanja Smiljanić produced the feature documentary Among the Palms the Bomb.

Guest-programmed by Gerald Weber (sixpackfilm), who also wrote the introduction above, this five-program retrospective is co-presented by the German Film Office and Anthology Film Archives.

Film Program

PROGRAM 1: AMONG THE PALMS THE BOMB
Lukas Marxt & Vanja Smiljanić, Among the Palms the Bomb, or: Looking for Reflections in the Toxic Field of Plenty (2024, 85 min.)

PROGRAM 2: NORTH
Lukas Marxt, Nella Fantasia (2012, 55 min.)
Lukas Marxt, Low Tide (2013, 3 min.)
Lukas Marxt, Two Skies (2013, 4 min.)
Lukas Marxt, High Tide (2014, 8 min.)
Lukas Marxt, Reign of Silence (2013, 7 min.)

PROGRAM 3: ENCOUNTERS I
Lukas Marxt & Vanja Smiljanić, Shadowland (2017, 47 min.)
Lukas Marxt & Jakub Vrba, Beautifully Maintained and Well Located (2021, 9 min.)
Lukas Marxt, Marine Target (2022, 9 min.)
Lukas Marxt, Loading Pit (2019, 10 min.)

PROGRAM 4: ENCOUNTERS II
Lukas Marxt, Ralf’s Colors (2019, 74 min.)
Luka Marxt & Marcel Odenbach, Fishing is Not Done on Tuesdays (2017, 15 min).

PROGRAM 5: TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPES
Lukas Marxt, Black Rain White Scars (2014, 8 min.)
Lukas Marxt, Valley Pride (2023, 13 min.)
Lukas Marxt, Imperial Valley (Cultivated Run-Off) (2018, 14 min.)
Lukas Marxt, Imperial Irrigation (2020, 20 min.)
Lukas Marxt, Circular Inscription (2016, 7 min.)
Lukas Marxt & Jakub Vrba, In a Beautiful and Quiet Location (2014, 13 min.)