Minimal Cinema: Walter De Maria

In resonance with the exhibition Minimal, films by artists featured in the exhibition – Charlotte Posenenske, Richard Serra, Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, and Agnes Martin – will be screened at the Auditorium during the Friday late-night openings.

The series continues with a looped screening of the rarely shown Hard Core (1969), an innovative experimental film by American artist Walter De Maria.

Filmed in July 1969 in Nevada’s arid Black Rock Desert, Hard Core immerses viewers in a real-time experience of landscape. The film, devoid of dialogue and clear chronology, presents shots of a cracked dry lakebed with sweeping panoramas of the mountainous horizon, accompanied by a soundtrack composed by De Maria, blending percussion and wave-like sounds.

A single narrative moment interrupts the film’s measured rhythm: a cowboy duel between Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria, from which both emerge unscathed — evoking myths of the American West. The film concludes with a prolonged close-up of a young Vietnamese girl’s face, an implicit reminder of the Vietnam War (1955–1975), at its height when the film was shot.