Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives

VIKTORIA SCHMID

June 13 – June 14

June 13-14, 2026

Over the past fifteen years, artist and filmmaker Viktoria Schmid has gradually become anessential figure within the experimental film scene in Austria – no small accomplishment given the extraordinary richness and vibrancy of that country’s avant-garde film community. A onetime student of Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller, Schmid makes films whose thoughtful engagement with the medium of 16mm and 35mm – an engagement that is heavily influenced by her parallel practice as a sculptor and photographer – is reminiscent of the materialist/structuralist wing of experimental filmmaking. But her meditative and often painterly sensibility gives the films a texture and lyricism that makes them anything but academic or severe, and her deep interest in the history of image-making invests her explorations with layers social and historical as well as formal and conceptual.

Whether she’s creating photograms of various foods in FOODFILMS (2010), making a filmic double-portrait of herself and her sister in KATHARINAVIKTORIA (2011), installing screens in various natural landscapes to conjure “movies” directly out of sun and shadow (2016’s A  PROPOSAL TO PROJECT IN 4:3 and 2020’s A PROPOSAL TO PROJECT IN SCOPE), or using the technique of successive color separation photography (the approach she’s been developing in her most recent films) to conjure a unique visual representation of time, Schmid consistently finds new and visually exquisite ways to use the medium of film to imprint the phenomenological world on celluloid. Though her techniques are varied, her films invariably create the stage for a kind of confrontation between the visible (or sometimes the invisible) world and the medium of film, a confrontation that reveals new dimensions or potentialities in both.

For this program – the first comprehensive survey of her moving-image work in the U.S. – Schmid has chosen not to present her films in isolation, but to put them in conversation with the work of her colleagues, mentors, and inspirations. The two programs that Schmid has guest-selected demonstrate her relationship to film as both a maker and a curator, and represent an opportunity to see rarely-screened works by a wide variety of filmmakers from around the world and through many eras.

The screenings are co-presented by the Deutsches Haus at NYU and Erste Bank, on the occasion of the co-awarding of the 2025 Viennale Erste Bank Film Award to Schmid’s ROJO ŽALIABLAU (2025). Since 2011, each annual edition of the Viennale (Vienna International FilmFestival) has featured the granting of the Viennale Erste Bank Film Award to one or more filmmakers whose films are included within the festival. Designed to showcase the best of Austrian cinema, the Award was founded by Erste Bank, the Viennale’s main sponsor, and is awarded according to the findings of an independent jury. The Award brings a cash prize as well as a residency as a visiting filmmaker organized by Deutsches Haus at NYU.

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