Maria Lassnig, who died in 2014, is internationally regarded as one of the most important painters of the 20th century. Her lyrical abstraction, developed from her own physical experience - the so-called "body awareness", in which emotional experience and physical sensibility are combined - also found cinematic expression in the early 1970s. As part of her New York exile, Lassnig attended an animation film class at the School of Visual Arts and began filming on 8mm and 16mm.

After Bruce Bailie, the Film Museum pays respect to another key figure of the New American Cinema revolution – this time one from the East rather than the West Coast: Hollis Frampton (1936-1984). After his formative "year of apprenticeship" spent with poet Ezra Pound (1957/1958), Ohio-born Frampton moved to New York in order to establish himself as a painter. He moved from photography to 16mm film and was soon celebrated as a visionary of Structural Film.

"The goal is for the projected image to have the same force of awakening sight as any other great image."

Over five decades, American filmmaker Robert Beavers (*1949) has come closer to this self-set goal than anyone else in his métier. Those fortunate enough to have experienced the complete retrospective of Beavers' work organized by the Austrian Film Museum in the autumn of 2010 are familiar with the sensory intoxication and the intensity of visual and aural experiences these works give rise to. They offer an immersion into the beauty and intelligence of craft – both when it comes to the places and activities recorded by Beavers (anywhere between Florence and Massachusetts) and in relation to his own film craft shining in the projection.