Now Instant and Acropolis Cinema present Sebastian Brameshuber’s portrait of life, labor, and landscape in the Austrian Alps, Movements of a Nearby Mountain, paired with two earlier shorts: Preserving Cultural Traditions (2004) and Of Stains, Scrap, and Tires (2014).

The screening will be followed by a Q&A and conversation with Brameshuber and Jordan Cronk.

In a voiceover Stan Brakhage articulates his resentments about the use of computers for art production and in general. This comment is contrasted by video imagery turning more and more abstract until it bursts into a sea of square pixels. The video is an ironic illustration of Brakhage’s views as these “defunct” images reveal a kind of beauty of their own.

The film begins with the blasting of a rock face on the Erzberg mountain—and with a poem by Brecht from the interwar period, which reflects on the close connection between the Styrian automobile industry and the arms industry. Two long pans through a gray landscape follow, while mild men’s voices from the off attempt to conduct business on the phone. Of Stains, Scrap & Tires is a calm, documentary miniature that chooses the auto export business of three young Nigerians in the Erzberg region as a point of association and departure for formulating something more fundamental about the first and third worlds, movement and standstill, business, space, and freedom. Director Sebastian Brameshuber demonstrates his appreciation of sculptural still life and fine moving-image compositions: car tires bounce through the garage as though possessing a life of their own, and the men perform physical labor on the car wrecks that they sell to Africa in whole or fileted pieces. Brameshuber hints at economic connections and processes, but is equally interested in the painterly traces of rust and paint, the inner lives of the motors and the view of the containers piled on top of one another in which the cars will be shipped. The acoustic has an equal position to the visual in this staging: in the off, a small radio play takes shape from the sounds of tools, buzzing motors, and the rattling paintball gun. The precision of form keeps the narrative openness in check, the pointed montage delivers impressions, fragments of a very special average workday.; allows no overview, but instead, coolly protocols the interplay of bodies and machines, sticking close to the details of the garage, the fork lifts, paint guns, and heaps of rubber and rims.

At the foot of the Austrian Alps, a Nigerian mechanic works in a garage, repairing and exporting cars to his homeland. In the distance is Erzberg, a mountain that’s been mined for iron ore since Ancient Rome. Against this backdrop, the mechanic toils away in relative solitude, his routine labor standing in stark contrast to the resources being mined for capitalist gain in his periphery. A result of director Sebastian Brameshuber’s friendship with the film’s real-life subject and framed around a centuries-old legend of the mine’s mysterious creation, Movements of a Nearby Mountain commingles fact and fiction, myth and memory, in a meditation on man’s place in our globalist economy. Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2019 Cinéma du Réel.

Please note: seating is limited. Box Office opens thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Guests may add their name to the standby list upon arrival. Online ticket sales will be honored up until 15 minutes after the scheduled showtime; at that time, any unclaimed seats will be released for in-store purchase on a first-come, first-served basis. All Sales Final.