Sinus Beta

The following can be seen: unpleasant photos from a book on facial expressions and gestures, some heads from the Szondi test, figures dodging the rain, a few glances from a tower down at the people below, and finally fragments of an action, which Kren captured on film in 1966 at the Destruction in Art Symposium in London. Sinus Beta is almost a sort of teaching film about bodily behavior in different situations. The film also produces – through the heterogenic photographic materiality of the primary elements – a cross-section of the methods, used in capturing the body in a still photograph. And so the roughly-grained photos from the book seem to be like the booty, which Etienne-Jules Marey shot with his chrono-photographic shotgun, while trying to make the bodily movements surveyable. (Michael Palm: “Which Way? Drei Pfade durchs Bild-Gebüsch von Kurt Kren,” in: (ed.) H. Scheugl, Ex Underground Kurt Kren. Seine Filme, Vienna 1996)