10/65: Selbstverstümmelung

“Kren’s 10/65: Self-Mutilation is developed from a Gunter Brus ‘action.’ What the film emphasizes is the surrealistic drama of symbolic self-destruction that Kren drew out of Brus’s action, pacing out each gesture so that one gets a tense, iconoclastic revelation of a man covered in white plaster lying surrounded by razor blades and a range of instruments looking as if they have been taken from an operating theater. The blades, scissors and scalpels are gradually inserted into him in a ritualistic self-operation.” —Stephen Dwoskin