In the history of film culture, Kubelka stands alongside Jonas Mekas as a major cinematheque founder and archivist who is also an acknowledged part of the filmmaking canon. With just a few shorts, created frame by frame between 1956 and 1960 (Adebar, Schwechater, and Arnulf Rainer), Kubelka staked out film's modernist edge-and its abyss: a degree-zero of sheer celluloid rapture, flamboyantly expressive of the medium's potential as a new form of thinking. Following his ‘metrical' and ‘metaphorical' film phases, Kubelka now submits a new type of cinema for our consideration: the ‘metaphysical' film. Metaphysical in the sense that, for the first time in his career, Kubelka allows the medium's materiality (i.e., what film physically consists of) to recede, and instead foregrounds cinema's magical capacity to locate and record anthropological rules, rituals, and myths in the unlikeliest of places. Apart from being great fun, Poetry and Truth (his first film in twenty-six years) adds another layer to the portrait of the artist as archeologist-as a hunter-gatherer of artifacts that, 100 or 500 years hence, may reveal the answers to questions that cannot even be conceived of today.”