1968
3 min., color, silent

During the era of celluloid film, rolls of red 16mm and 35mm leader film were manufactured and sold, designed to be attached to the end of film reels so that a projectionist, upon opening the film can, could immediately see whether the film was wound to the beginning or the end.I was once told that the red color was achieved by dyeing clear film stock with blue ink and printing it like a negative, thereby producing red film. In 1968, I purchased two 50-meter rolls of 16mm red film. Approximately 30 meters of this were used for Eroticon sublim.The remaining material stayed in a can, which I subsequently handed over to the Austrian Film Archive.

In 1968, I wrote that the film—treated from an analytical perspective purely as material—could run uncut through the projector in any direction: forwards or backwards, right-side up or upside down, or laterally reversed. Eroticon, I claimed, was beholden to the color of the material itself. The original movement of the liquid dye can be sensed as an indeterminate sensory perception against the dark red surface—hence the word sublime in the title.

I view this differently today. In November 2025, I was able to see a screening of the 60-year-old rolls, which had remained untouched in their can. The film’s sublimity lies in the experience of viewing a monochrome surface that absorbs all sensory perception. It is not a physical surface like the red in Mark Rothko’s paintings, but rather an incorporeal plane of light. I saw the paintings at the KHM in 2019, however, I had already engaged with his monochrome paintings more than twenty years earlier.

“Mark Rothko’s large-format paintings are designed to be viewed from close range, such that the viewer’s field of vision does not extend beyond the picture plane. The rectangular fields of color generate an indeterminate sense of space intended to induce a meditative state in the viewer. In the act of seeing the imperceptible (as space and form), consciousness is brought to a threshold that reflects it back upon itself. As substance, Rothko’s pictorial surfaces remain elusive.”   (Hans Scheugl: Das Absolute. Eine Ideengeschichte der Moderne. Vienna/New York 1999, p. 340).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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