Beat Kuert

Beat Kuert
Beat_Kuert.jpg Beat_Kuert.jpg
Born	3 November 1946 Zurich
🏳️ Nationality	Swiss
💼 Occupation
👩 Spouse(s)	Barbara Riesen
🏅 Awards	Festival di Hyeres : Critics Award and Special Award of the Jury 1979 Schilten – Best Director Award of the International Association Cinema d´Arts et d´Essai 1979 Schilten – Best Director Award of the Ecumenical Jury – Festival di Locarno 1979 Schilten – Best Director Award Zürcher Filmpreis 1979 Schilten – Best Director Award of the Jury "Chretiens Media" – Festival de droit de l´homme Strasbourg 1985 Martha Dubronski – Best Director Festival di Bludenz Award of the Jury 1985 Martha Dubronski – Best Director Festival di Bludenz Award of the Jury 1985 Martha Dubronski – Best Screenplay Walo Award 2005 Berg und Geist – Best Director Bizzarro di Bronzo – Festival Bizzarro 2009 Grave New World – Best Director
🌐 Website	beatkuert.com

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Beat Kuert (born 1946) is a Swiss film director, multimedia artist, and author. He is considered by a number of critics, such as journalist Ernst Buchmüller, as one of the most daring explorers of his generation.

His work investigates human existential dilemmas through aesthetic experiences that he stages as an artistic laboratory, drawing on various expressions and integrating different art forms. After a successful career as a film director, he devoted himself to visual arts. Kuert’s images are often provocative and their aim is giving the viewer a sense of wonder. The impression he strives to make revolves around seeking the sublime in human emotions. According to Kuert, the purpose of art is serving as a door to the unconscious. Therefore, an artist's role is inspiring others to look for the wonderful aspects outside everyday routine by infusing his works with energy and thus giving back all the energy he has drawn from the world.

1970s: Early experiences

During the 1960s and 1970s, Beat Kuert was self taught in visual arts while living in Zurich. There were few cinema schools in that period and Kuert was against these institutions that tried to maintain and teach ideologies from the past. At the time, artists felt the need to take their inspiration from the streets, breaking down traditional barriers between intellectuals and workers, between creators and viewers. While sharing those ideas and drawing on the vitality of that period, Kuert chose to make his first feature film in a natural setting, conducting a dialogue with his inner world and filming in the mountains. His works sought an introspective point of view and this aspect is still a constant feature of his work. Turnus Film AG in Zurich noticed the artist's experimental short films and documentaries, and between 1968 and 1970 Kuert worked for the company as an editor and director.

In 1971, during a nine-month trip to Latin America, he shot his first feature-length documentary, Ein Erfolg unserer Entwicklungshilfe, examining development policies in Latin America.

Debut

As an independent filmmaker he made his debut in 1974 with the full-length film Mulungu, based on a Swiss German legend. The film tells the story of an architect who, after an accident on a glacier, has continuous encounters with a goatherd sacrificed to the Goat God Mulungu. The myth would remain a recurrent motif for Kuert.

Personal life

In 1979 he married the television producer Barbara Riesen and they had a son, the film director and screenwriter Lucius C. Kuert.

1980s: "Al Castello" film productions

By the early Eighties Kuert gained a reputation as an accomplished experimental film director and producer. His repertoire was characterized by constant research into images and their possible manipulation and experimentation. Many of his stories are based on literary works in which the subject revolves around time. In Warten auf, a short film based on the play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Kuert interprets time as the eternal expectation of something that never comes. The 1982 fictional documentary Die Zeit ist böse, based on the novel "Der barmherzige Hügel" by Lore Berger, reveals the growing malaise of the leading character, locked into a meaningless and endless routine of work and study. The lack of inspiration to live even to the next day pushes her to extreme measures. The director chose to stage the suicide from the tower where the anti-heroine went every day until her death, and he exploits the powerful contrast between light and darkness. In these films time is stopped and ends with acquiescent agony. In 1985 Kuert left Zurich and with other directors and producers founded Al Castello, an independent film production based in Arzo, in southern Switzerland.

1990s: Architecture documentaries

In 1996 Kuert directed several documentaries about some of the key figures in contemporary architecture: Jean Nouvel, Mario Botta, Herzog & de Meuron, Luigi Snozzi, Max Dudler. For this works Kuert used a particular point of view as well as a personal style to convey each architect’s vision and aesthetic sense.

2000s: dust&scratches

From 2000 to 2006 Kuert taught at the Zelig School of Documentary and Television of Bolzano (Italy) and was professor of Visual Arts at the University of Supsi Lugano (Switzerland). Kuert has long felt it important to build his art as a creative container that, starting with its conception, includes the free and continuous interdisciplinary integration of the various artistic languages – video art, live performance, poetry, music, photography – to produce a complete and complex event. In 2005, after directing and producing the experimental film Tre artiste, Kuert put together a group of performers, musicians, photographers, dancers, and actors and set up headquarters in Arzo (Switzerland) to conceive, develop, and produce new projects. He founded the group dust&scratches, an artistic workshop that represents a live connector of different energies. Through its synergy, the group attempts to generate a new way of thinking about art that develops a strong artistic identity through continuous contamination and happenings. Many of the artists who have been or still are involved in it or have stated that the dust&scratches artistic workshop has represented a crucial moment in the development of their careers.

2010s

Kuert’s work continues in the ‘10s with important installations in Personal Structures / Crossing Borders, collateral events of the Venice’s Biennale d’Arte in which, apart from analyzing the themes already abundantly explored in the previous decades, he approaches new thematic cores like the ones of hallucination and desire. In 2015 he presents FaultLine / TimeLine at Bembo Palace and in 2017, in the same location, GOOD MORNING DARKNESS. In November of the same year he is protagonist of the event Processualità ideative e attuative di un libro d’artista held in Milan’s National Braidense Library during which he presents his last book Beat Me, A Pictorial Requiem. In March 2018 takes part in MIA Photo fair, the first and most important fair dedicated to photography and moving image with the project Quella Croce Bianca .

Artistic research

The process leading Kuert from experimental films to the figurative arts is marked by his search for the quintessential image that can encompass this intense energy as it unfolds. To achieve this goal, through performance Kuert first materializes a world where he immerses the spectator in his vision, subject to the conditions imposed by the spaces in which the performance takes place. Still images obtained from this experience seem to be composed of figures, but they are often enhanced with other languages – calligraphy, texts, and music staffs – and enriched with expressive titles often related to myths or to works evoked by the artist. Reworked in the studio, in a subsequent investigation his images express things that have never ceased to exist, but that continue in the eyes of the audience and that strive to awaken the desire to "be" the change we are waiting for.

Artistic path

Kuert’s work investigates human existential dilemmas. The first theme he develops is related to time. His film characters experience eternal agony that often turns into tragedy. This is the first expression of pain and deep agony that Kuert identifies as stagnation. The expression of this distress grows in a violent scream to affirm one’s self or to look for an answer. In the Donna Carnivora project, his characters are destructive and they powerfully express their agony. They are presented as mythical figures, always feminine, since it is in the woman’s image that he distinguishes the vital and sensual element that ultimately transcends the carnal aspect to become a symbol of humankind. The stillness, the boundaries, the outlined contours of the figures have the same meaning in Kuert's works. In his poetics, color and a sense of movement prevail over the subject’s precise definition, as can be seen in Destroyed Lines, asserting the desire for greater fluidity. The goal is representing emotions and bring together – through their depiction – the keys to access an inner world. This goal is always inspired by the fullest incitement experience can offer. When Kuert comes into contact with Eastern philosophies, he opens his horizons to new themes, as in Kan-Longing for Rain; he discovers how destruction and chaos can become the engine for new regeneration or change. He expresses the idea that it is not death that represents the end, but the lack of movement. With the development of the Wunderkammer, Kuert's cabinet of curiosities, his vision of the world multiplies, because there are many coexisting realities that are always slightly different yet are always part of a whole. Kuert shares with the viewer the astonishment he feels as he probes the human soul and he strives to make us want to grasp this wonder from everyday life. The sense of hope, of energy, that lingers in everything around us is also expressed in the Moving Mountains and Illustrating Cities series. In the first series he uses the metaphor of mountains to manipulate their shapes and move them from their motionless image. In the second series, he instead offers a snapshot of vibrant New York City. He chose this subject for the tragedy that touched the city and the magnificence New York expresses, to show how the lives of men and their systems are superseded: it is from ruins that reconstruction is possible.

Kuert views himself as an artist of the "sublime". In his poetry he always plays with concepts and their opposites: the carnality of his figures and their symbolic developments, the digital medium and the picturesque image, the destruction of his own images to seek a new meaning yet again, and the representation of pain to evoke hope.

Filmography

Director

• Lulla (1966), short film
• Eine Welt wie Barbara (1967), short film
• Ein Erfolg unserer Entwicklungshilfe (1971), documentary
• Mulungu (1974), feature film
• Schilten (verschiedene internationale Auszeichnungen) (1979), based on Schilten by Hermann Burger
• Die Zeit ist böse (1982)
• Pi-errotische Beziehungen (1982)
• Martha Dubronski, (1984)
• Deshima, with screenplay by Adolf Muschg (1987)
• L´Assassina (1989), featuring Maria Sofia Ricci and Margaret Mazzantini
• Der Grossinquisitor (1991), based on a legend from the 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Hanna & Rocky (1993), featuring and produced by Gardi Hutter
• Am Ende der Zeit (1998)
• Jean Nouvel, Ästhetik des Wunderbaren, portrait of the architect Jean Nouvel (1998)
• Tate Modern, Portrait of the Restored London Art Gallery (2000)
• Herzog & de Meuron (2002)
• Architectour de Suisse-Portraits of Swiss architects (Herzog & de Meuron, Mario Campi, Luigi Snozzi, Ivano Gianola, Moro & Moro, Mario Botta) (2002)
• ICHLIEBEMICH (2003), portrait of the artist Alex Sadkowsky
• La Nuova Scala(2005)
• Berg&Geist (2004–2014)

External links

• Official website
• Alcastello.tv
• Beat Kuert on IMDb
• Filmography and biography
• Artfilm.ch

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