Peter Patzak was born in Vienna, Austria, where he studied psychology and art history. His first art exhibition was held under the patronage of Albert Paris Gütersloh.
In the mid-1960s, he was invited to participate in the Films of Art show in New York. From 1968 to 1970, he worked on experimental and short films in New York, where he became friends with Paul Morrissey.
Patzak directed his first feature film, Die Situation, in 1972, after returning to Vienna. He held a professorship at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, since 1990, and became Head of the Institute for Film and Television in 2008, retiring in 2013.
He made television history with his anarchistic parody of the crime genre in Kottan Ermittelt, which ran from 1976 to 1983. Patzak received many awards, including the Adolf Grimme Prize, the Goldene Kamera, the Goldene Romy, the Berlin and Moscow Film Festival Prizes for Kassbach, the 1996 Russian Filmmakers Prize in Moscow for Shanghai 1937, and the UNESCO Prize for Gelobtes Land.
Patzak was honored with retrospectives of his extensive and multifaceted career at festivals including the Cinématèque Francaise, the Max Ophüls Festival, the Carnegie Hall Cinema in New York, in Jerusalem, at the Austrian Film Days in Berlin, and at festivals in Cairo, Damascus, and Shanghai.
In 2002, he received the Canal Grande Award for best director in Venice for his adaptation of Die Wasserfälle von Slunj based on the novel of the same name by Heimito von Doderer. The film also received the Austrian National Education Prize. In 2003, Patzak won the Emerging Maverick Director's Award for Zodiac Sign at the San Jose Film Festival. In 2010, he was honored with a retrospective by the Filmarchiv Austria accompanied by a comprehensive monograph with an introduction by Marin Scorsese.
Patzak's painting career began as early as 1961 with regular exhibitions that he titled, The Physicists' Halftime, Communication Machines and TV-Images, The Color White, Body Serviettes and Tablecloths, Traces and Shrines, Shanghai Notebook, Le Porte Delle Vecchie, and Finestre von Vedute.
Since 2007, he has created following series: Die ungleichen Stunden, Stimmen aus dem Lupanar, Das Buch der Nikarete, Rectinas Briefe. His latest exhibitions were all titled Daten and included the series Briefe nach Perigord, Gate to the Garden, and Briefe an Eve.
Patzak also served as author, co-author, and producer of many of his films. Several of his books were made into audio books, including his 2005 novel Der Geist der Farbe. His play, Akte - im Schweigen vermählt, premiered in 2008 at Vienna's Stadttheater. In October of 2008, a prose version of the theater script appeared in the Ralph Klever Verlag. Other publications include Full Circle, and Walter Schurian's Bild, Film, Schrift, which investigates the correlation between Peter Patzak's artistic, filmic, and literary work.
