When news broke that German avant-garde composer Mauricio Kagel had died, I decided to revisit the 76-year-old's canon in memoriam. And a vast one it is too: apart from his mammoth catalogue of musical compositions, Kagel was also active in several other artistic pursuits, the most well-known being his films, including Ludwig Van, the 100-minute treatise which explores Beethoven's music, its centrepiece being a room covered from top to bottom with Beethoven's musical scores.
But if tracking down Kagel's musical work is difficult - many of his pieces have remained at the periphery of contemporary classical music - the chances of finding his films on video, let alone in the cinema, is very unlikely.
By the end of the evening, however, I had managed to see a protracted version of Ludwig Van, and even some other obscure pieces such as Hallelujah (a surrealist film from 1969 built on images of parts of the human body) and Blue's Blue (a 1981 piece in which Kagel and a musical trio 'play' four bored musicians).
That these unconventional films can now be watched is due to the efforts of UbuWeb (ubu.com), an online archive of avant-garde art founded in 1996 by American poet Kenneth Goldsmith. The site is dedicated solely to the circulation of hard-to-find, out-of-print material, which explains the presence of Kagel's films alongside works by Stan Brakhage, Peter Greenaway, Agnes Varda and Ken Jacobs, not to mention hundreds of others by obscure artists and filmmakers.
UbuWeb also deals with more than just classics. The most recent additions to the site include three videos by US-based artist Paul Chan, which address the so-called war on terror through images of American soldiers serving in Iraq (Re: The Operation, 2002), the daily existence of Iraqi civilians (Baghdad in No Particular Order, 2003) and a 2006 video about Lynne Stewart, an attorney who was disbarred and eventually sentenced to 26 months in prison after issuing a press release for her client, the imprisoned Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman. Among other new entries are works by Michael Snow and Johan van der Keuken.
What makes UbuWeb an incredible resource is that everything is available for free. Hardly a novelty these days, what with YouTube's emergence as the mammoth video-sharing entity, but the profit-free site is also free of advertising, which means straightforward navigation across uncluttered pages where films and sound files can be viewed using embedded media players.