33/77 Keine Donau

Synopsis

Kurt Kren: Here there were several attempts. The first attempt was in Munich, which is why the title is: Keine Donau (No Danube). We had a problem there, my camera got stuck. Also, with the multiple exposures, I had closed the aperture too tightly; the film was meant to be exposed at a different place each time, going through the camera thirteen times. That was difficult to calculate, of course. During the second attempt in Munich still, there was a sideways incidence of light. Then I came to Vienna and took recordings from Trude Rind's balcony with Ernst Schmidt's Bolex. Something was wrong with the automatic there. I think it was the fourth attempt when it finally worked. The film went through the camera thirteen times, each time at a different distance setting: infinity, 8, 6, 5, 4, and 3 meters. And the one-meter sequence with a colour filter.

Hans Scheugl: In the end, the film was actually shot in Vienna.

KK: Still, the Danube is not in it.

The camera that died during the first attempt in Munich was the Pathé 16 Webo M., with which Kren had shot all of his films up to that point. It had a sectoring and iris aperture, and could be exposed with a single shot switch, and with 8, 16, 24, 32, 64, and 80 images per second.