Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives

LUKAS MARXT

August 22 – August 24

August 22-24, 2025

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 Smiljanic produced the feature documentary AMONG THE PALMS THE BOMB.

These programs – which will be presented by Marxt in person – mark the first comprehensive retrospective of his work in the U.S.

Guest-programmed by Gerald Weber (sixpackfilm), who also wrote the introduction above, this retrospective is co-presented with the German Film Office, an initiative of the Goethe-Institut and German Films.

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