Diagonale-Preis Innovatives Kino

der Stadt Graz

Bester innovativer Film, Experimental- oder Animationsfilm:
Johann Lurf für ★

€ 6.000, gestiftet vom Kulturressort der Stadt Graz sowie ein Gutschein über

€ 3.000, gestiftet von Golden Girls Filmproduktion

★ © sixpackfilm/Johann Lurf

Die Begründung der Jury:
„In his vertiginous, colossal work, ★, Johann Lurf gathers together imagery from no less than 550 films throughout the history of cinema, extracting only those sequences that depict the star-filled nighttime sky, unobscured by any terrestrial element. The resulting cinematic journey of more than 99 minutes is truly transcendental.
With the soundtrack edited in sync with the imagery, ★ is as much a sonic collage as a visual one, conjuring up an entire world of off-screen space and narrative traces. But if ★’s gaze is perpetually outward, away from the earth, it sheds as much light on matters political, social, cultural, and historical as celestial. The sequences Lurf has gathered together have a fascinating story to tell about the gradual shifting of human perspectives, intellectual and artistic ideas, gender codes, and technological tools.
The film reveals the astonishing range of methods filmmakers have used to depict the nighttime sky. Part of the poetry of ★ lies in its revelation that, despite its ubiquity in our daily lives and collective imagination, the stars elude photographic representation – their depiction in the cinema is almost necessarily a matter of imaginative reconstruction, opening a space even in the most literal-minded films for creative expression.
A film whose apparent minimalism functions as a portal to a great richness and invites profound contemplation, ★ takes its place within the glorious tradition of experimental found footage films, following in the footsteps of pioneers like Adrian Brunel, Henri Stork, the French lettrists, and Bruce Conner. With this film Lurf joins the firmament of the great contemporary masters of the genre, such as Volker Schreiner, Matthias Muller, Christoph Girardet, Gustav Deutsch, and Christian Marclay, to name a few.
Designed to be as comprehensive and ever-expanding as possible, STAR is more in the nature of a compendium than a fixed artistic product. It is a work of exhilarating thematic complexity, open to an almost unlimited range of interpretations. Appropriately for a film that focuses its attention on the heavens, ★ contains multitudes.

Das Preisgeld erhält der/die Regisseur/in des Films, den Gutschein die Produktionsfirma des Films. In die Auswahl für den Preis Innovatives Kino kommen alle österreichischen Experimental-, Animations- oder innovativen Kurzfilme*, die im Programm der Diagonale’18 präsentiert werden.

Jury Innovatives Kino:
Christophe Bichon (Collection Manager, Light Cone, FR)
Jed Rapfogel (Film Programmer, Anthology Film Archives, US)
Kate Strain (Künstlerische Leiterin, Grazer Kunstverein, IE)