Schwechater

In 1957 Peter Kubelka was hired to make a short commercial for Schwechater beer The beer company undoubtedly thought they were commissioning a film that would help them sell their beers Kubelka had other ideas He shot his film with a camera that did not even have a viewer simply pointing it in the general direction of the action He then took many months to edit his footage while the company fumed and demanded a finished product Finally he submitted a film 90 seconds long that featured extremely rapid cutting cutting at the limits of most viewers perception between images washed out almost to the point of abstraction in blackandwhite positive and negative and with red tint of dimly visible people drinking beer and of the froth of beer seen in a fully abstract pattern