Austria Hungry: Return of a Film Nation. Vienna’s Forgotten Influence and New Austrian Film

8/13/15, 12:01 PMAustria Hungry: The Return of a Film Nation - Bright Lights Film Journal

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Robert von DassanowskyRobert von Dassanowsky February 1, 2006February 1, 2006

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Weird Band Names

Vienna’s Forgotten Influence and New Austrian

Film

Two unrelated events signaled a kind of poetic

caesura in Austrian cinema at its second turn of

the century: Austria’s first film star, Liane Haid,

died in Switzerland at age 105, and Barbara

Albert’s film, Nordrand/Northern Skirts (1999),

emerged as the international festival sensation

Austria had not experienced since the postwar

era, fulfilling what Susan Ladika had suggested

in The Hollywood Reporter in 1997 when she

remarked that Austrian film “is ready to take on

an international profile.”1 Haid’s death in 2000

at such an advanced age, served to remind

Austrians and cineastes abroad that Austria had

a long film tradition, that it was once at the

forefront of European cinema, and that it lost

its cultural connection with that past. Like the

major silent film celebrity she had been, even

in death Haid briefly refocused the nation’s

attention away from politics and the economy,

and onto the world of lost glamour and fantasy.

For a country accustomed to grand tributes on

the passing of opera stars, orchestra

conductors, and theater actors, the reflections


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on Haid’s demise seemed almost apologetically

fascinated with the subject, as if some treasure,

negligently and long misplaced, had suddenly

reappeared.

The

death

in 2002

of

veteran Hollywood writer/director Billy

Wilder(right, with Willi Forst) had a similar

effect on the collective film memory of the

nation. But Wilder — who was born in the

Austro-Hungarian town of Sucha, found work

in Berlin’s Weimar-era film industry, and was

already a fixture in Hollywood early in his

career — had been but a minor journalist in

Vienna and never directed a film there. It was

enough that this internationally known “film

legend,” was Austrian. More importantly,

however, he symbolized the forgotten Austrian

diaspora in Hollywood. Wilder had been vocal

about his problems with recent Austrian

politics, but nevertheless accepted honors from

the federal government (as well as from

Germany and France) shortly before his death.

And it was at his death that American film

critics and journalists who hailed him as one of

cinema’s greats, rediscovered on several

tangential levels the once significant Austrian

population in Hollywood. It seemed almost a

backhanded tribute that Wilder’s obituaries in

the English-language press would repeatedly

mistake Vienna as his birthplace. But even

prior to Wilder’s demise, Austrians, buoyed by

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the sudden fascination of Europe with its new

film, decided that there was an important

cinema history to be known and (re)presented,

and that people would come to pay tribute to

not only operatic and theatrical greats, but to

film artists as well.2

Early twentieth-century Austria seeded the

world with its film talent as it did with its

influential modernism in science and the arts.

Its multicultural cinema remains among the

most accomplished and innovative in Europe,

but among the least studied: progressive silent-

era social dramas created by a female film

pioneer, Louise Kolm-Fleck;3 monumental epics

rivaling those of America’s D. W. Griffith

produced by Austria’s first film mogul, Count

Alexander “Sascha” Kolowrat, and directed by

Austro-Hungarians Michael Curtiz and

Alexander Korda; the early sound “Viennese

Film” of Walter Reisch and Willi Forst, which

blended musical romance and drama into a

unique mix; influential postwar sociopolitical

satire and experimentalism. It was German

pressure on Austria to “aryanize” its industry or

lose German distribution in the years prior to

the Anschluss that necessitated Jewish and

other “unacceptable” film artists to create an

independent Emigrantenfilm, in co-production

with Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Dutch, and

even Scandinavian studios. These films, which

were not for German import and starred such

actors as Franziska Gaal, Hans Jaray, and Szöke

Szakall, are now considered among the best

comedies and musicals of the era.4

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Austrian film has a

stronger connection

with Hollywood’s

Golden Age than any

other European

cinema due to the

sheer amount of

expatriate or exiled

Austrian film talent,

which included

among many others:

Erich von Stroheim,

Fritz Lang, Elisabeth Bergner, Hedy Lamarr,

Paul Henreid, Fred Zinnemann, and Otto

Preminger. While much has been written on

the German/Austrian basis for film noir, the

acclaimed Hollywood screwball comedy style

has never been given its due as a comedy genre

that is originally Austrian. This style would

eventually come home again, expanded by

Hollywood and thus newly inspirational to

filmmakers during the Wien-Film studio era

(1938-45), when the fast-talking, Viennese

dialect-laden humor (and images of Biedermeier

Austria) often subverted Nazi ideology, even

censorship.5

With Austria gaining a reputation for lavish

imperial epics and musicals (the Romy

Schneider “Sissi” films being just one example)

but no federal financial support or training for

a new generation of filmmakers as other

Western European cinemas enjoyed, the

postwar boom ended and Austria’s commercial

film disappeared by the mid-1960s. It was

largely replaced by Actionist performance art

and poverty-level experimentation but no “new





wave” that would attract audiences or film

scholars. It was this artificial suffocation of

Austrian film that allowed for the erroneous

and widespread notion that “there is no real

film culture” in Austria.6 Largely forgotten by

cineastes and audiences over the next two

decades, Austrian film slowly attained sporadic

critical praise during the mid-1980s, and since

the 1990s, festival appearances have focused

international attention on what is being called

New Austrian Film. Work by Valie Export,

Paulus Manker, Wolfgang Murnberger,

Christian Berger, Wolfram Paulus, and Michael

Haneke, would display mainstreamed avant-

gardism that could coexist in cinemas with

Austrian films that were more “traditional” or

influenced by the television aesthetic.7 During

the last decade, there has also been a re-vision

of old genres, such as the social critique drama

of the 1920s and ’30s and the Heimatfilm of the

1940s and ’50s.

It was

the

2001

exhibition Alles Lei(n)wand: Franz Antel und der

österreichische Film/Everything for the Screen:

Franz Antel and Austrian Film,at the usually

high-art venue of the Historical Museum of the

City of Vienna, that indicated a new national

attitude towards Austrian film history.

Presentation of the veteran director/producer

as a major contributor to Austrian and





international cinema art (with continuous

screenings of some of his more recent films)

was a major volley against popular amnesia

and critical discounting of the national cinema.

Perhaps more than any other director, Antel

represents the rise, fall, and rise experience of

Austrian film since the postwar era. His lush

imperial epics, musicals, and dramas of the

1950s are generally considered classics. His

sexploitation comedies of the 1960s kept a

fatally ill cinema alive at a time when there was

no other national production to speak of, and

his international co-productions of the 1970s

and ’80s brought talent to Vienna, employing

Austrian artists, technicians, and studio

facilities in a manner even Hollywood had long

abandoned. In addition to the many German-

language actors he brought to stardom, he also

helped launch the careers of directors Peter

Sämann and Istvan Szabo. His Bockerer films

have been an important part of the New

Austrian Film trend that attempts to deal

critically with the nation’s recent past — and in

the commercial way that has always been

central to the director’s style. At age ninety, as

one of the oldest active filmmakers in the

world, Antel directed the fourth installment of

his Bockerer saga, Der neue Bockerer — Prager

Frühling/The New Bockerer — Prague Spring, in

early 2003. The film finds the Viennese butcher

and curmudgeon (Karl Merkatz), who

previously stood up against the Nazis, the

postwar Soviet occupation, and the Communists

in 1956 Hungary, now involved in the

Czechoslovakian uprising of 1968. The

introduction of a younger generation of

Bockerer’s family belies the announcement that

this would be the final installment in what has

become a serial on the trauma of Central

Europe in the mid- and late twentieth century.



Through its preservation activities,

publications, and screenings, the Film Archive

Austria has, in a few short years, elevated old

Austrian films into something more valuable

than the filler they had been on morning

television. Complementing this work are the

retrospectives and presentations of the

Austrian Film Museum,8 which has managed to

transform the screenings of even obscure film

artists into newsworthy public events. A

notable example is the retrospective based on

the book Tribute to Sascha by Viennese film

critic Michael Omasta, which recognized the

pioneering work of Austrian-American

cinematographer, editor, and film critic Sasha

Hammid (aka Alexander Hackenschmied), who

was instrumental in the development of IMAX.

Hammid had begun his experimental cinema

work in Prague in the 1930s and had assisted

his wife, avant garde filmmaker Maya Deren, in

the creation of her milestone experimental film,

Meshes of the Afternoon (USA 1943). Following

documentaries for the U.S. Office of War

Information, his film projects with Francis

Thompson for the United Nations led to the

concepts that became the revolutionary IMAX

system. Although praised for his progressive

camera work by mainstream directors such as

John Ford, William Wyler and Jean Renoir,

cinema verité exponent D. A. Pennebaker, and

veteran cameraman Douglas Slocombe,

Hammid and his work have remained

unexplored in American film scholarship. It is a

rare triumph for Austrian cineastes to reclaim a

pioneer of such stature.




With the

European

Union’s over

reactive

boycott of

Austria in

response to its

elections of

1999 rapidly

placed into the

past,

commentary

about the “change” in Austria had taken on a

completely different meaning by 2002: the new

Museum Quarter in Vienna, consisting of a

splendid restoration/conversion of the imperial

stables by baroque architect Fischer von Erlach

and several provocatively designed new

buildings, was hailed as among the largest sites

devoted to art exhibition in the world. In

evaluating the innovative design of the new

Austrian Cultural Forum building (above) in

New York by Austrian-American architect

Raimund Abraham, New York Times

architecture critic Herbert Mushamp labeled it

“A gift of Vienna that skips the Schlag.”

Fascinated by the fact that something was

“going on” here, Mushamp offered his own

explanation: “since the end of the Cold War, it

has become increasingly clear that Vienna, past

and present, has a pivotal role to play in

developing a new cosmopolitan outlook.”9

There is also veiled critique in the praise of

Austria’s newly strengthened artistic presence

in the U.S., as in the statement by Leon Botstein,

Music Director of the American Symphony

Orchestra, who finds discord between the

country’s avant gardist, even cultural

revolutionary interests and recent Austrian

national politics: “A nation shouldn’t be




confused with its government.”10 Laura Heon,

curator of a show on new Viennese art at Mass

MoCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) in North

Adams, Massachusetts, considers that “for the

first time in 75 years, artists from Eastern

Europe are coming to Vienna for art school.

There is this flourishing scene now after 100

years of languishing.”11 Well meaning but

exaggerated in terms of time, the commentary,

like the many others that greeted Austria’s re-

emergence in the American and global art and

film scene, suggests a nation that has too long

tolerated a lack of its own international

promotion, particularly in the visual arts. It also

suggests a slight shift in the concept of Austrian

national identity. Never a homogeneous

culture, but a melting pot that grew from an

empire colonizing itself eastward (as the United

States, its only true mirror, colonized itself

westward), its reduction to a small country with

a superpower history would be traumatic

enough for any nation. But given its

antagonistic relationship with the larger and

more powerful Germany in the twentieth

century, and the disconnection from its other

ethnocultural roots in Eastern Europe during

the Cold War, Austria embraced neutralist

escapism and artificial sociocultural

reinvention. The new Europe has allowed for

the return of polyglotism, multiculturalism, and

even controversial politics to Austria. This flux

inspires and drives the Austrian visual arts, and

no art form can bring the postmodern “crisis of

reason” and Austrian cultural multivalence to

the masses as film does.





A

provocative documentary assessing the center-

rightist government, which filmmakers for the

most part opposed (primarily the Haider-

associated but no longer led Freedom Party),

and which has not financially supported New

Austrian Film’s emergence launched the new

century in Austrian film. Zur Lage/State of the

Nation (2001, right) from Lotus-Film, a joint

project by Barbara Albert, Michael Glawogger,

Ulrich Seidl and Michael Sturminger, critically

explores the prevailing political and social

atmosphere under Austria’s neoconservative

coalition government. Following experimental

short films, the documentary form remains the

mainstay of Austrian cinema. Originally, this

was the easiest launch for a new filmmaker

given the limited subsidies available. But even

with the re-emergence of the Austrian feature

film, the documentary has not shown any sign

of abdicating its primacy. Since the 1990s,

Austrian experimental film and documentary

often cross into a hybrid that subverts the

authority of the factual non-narrative film and

mainstreams the abstract visions of edgy

cinematic exploration. Borrowing from literary

theory, this might be called New Historicist

cinema, as it emphasizes personal

history/mythology over preconceived or

“official” concepts. Formal properties are far

stronger than narrative structure here and the



result is contemplative, even hypnotic.

Reflecting Austria’s new interest in historical

reexamination and its geopolitical shifts, found

footage and random imagery deconstruct

preconceived or static identities into a collage

of reference-less filmic vocabulary that

ruptures the idea of any central ideology other

than its own immediate imprint. Seminal to this

style are both Nicholas Geyrhalter’s nearly five-

hour Elsewhere (1998), which offers interviews

with people living in difficult environments

across the world, and Michael Glawogger’s

Megacities (1998), which in its “world spanning

collection of slum and slaughterhouse images,

functions as a Koyaanisqatsiof squalor.”12

Unlike the international shock documentary

genre that began withMondo Cane (Italy 1962)

and continues to focus on unrelated sequences

of the unusually lurid, morbid, and grotesque,

Glawogger’s film disturbs the viewer by simply

framing the ugliness of everyday banality

without an overriding ideological or moral

point, as Ulrich Seidl does with his coolly

detached feature on the wrenching dystopia of

Viennese suburbia, Hundstage/Dog Days (2001).

Seidl allowed the monologues of six Austrian

Catholics sharing their thoughts and problems

through prayer in Jesus, Du weißt/Jesus, You

Know (2003) to stand on their own without

commentary or closure, but it is Gustav

Deutsch’s Film ist. 7-12/Film Is. 7-12 (2002below)

that functions as a kind of manifesto for this

hybrid, open-ended style:

Deutsch’s compilation of footage from

cinema’s earliest decades sets decaying,

hand tinted images of ancient modernity

against droning, staticky electronic

soundscapes by Christian Fennesz and

Martin Siewert. The result is a hypnotic drift

of relentless disjunctions: lions invade the




sitting room of mauve decade aristocrats; a

decapitated, haloed saint recovers her

severed head; a black-coated apparition

rises from a time-scratched sea.13

The title of

the work

suggests an

excerpt

from a

multi-

chaptered

documentary on cinema, but the film questions

the very idea of interpretive objectivity.

Deutsch organizes the widely varied material

into an Aristotelian dramatic structure so that

the audience desire to connect even random

images into a satisfying narrative is pre-

achieved in all its obvious and repetitive

artificiality. The result of this metafilmic

experiment, influenced by the work of Peter

Tscherkassky, the originator of the Austrian

found film style, is the realization that film, film

history, or even the film of history is but

subjective fictionalization of fiction. The

documentary can offer nothing more than

multivalent images that have no authority

beyond their application to personal mythology.

Emerging from an almost typical creative arc

beginning with early Super 8 experimentation

and study with 1960s avant garde filmmaker

Peter Kubelka, to sound/color 16 mm short

films and international attention is Thomas

Draschan. HisEncounter in Space (2003), a

seven-minute pastiche of brief excerpts from

international kitsch films and television

programs of the 1960s and ’70s, accomplishes a

narrative that at once imitates and lampoons




traditional cinema structures. Like Deutsch,

Draschan sutures found cinematic conventions,

but without the explicit suggestion of a pseudo-

documentary. With snippets from Hollywood B-

movies, Japanese and British science fiction,

Disney cartoons, Austrian historical drama, and

European sex films, Encounter underscores the

ideologies of entertainment film and the

expectations of the pop-culture audience. The

effect is evocative of the kaleidoscopic color

and vocabulary of Anglo-American psychedelic

cinema of the mid to late 1960s, but the

“narrative” suggests a postmodern sense of

futility in the adventure/spy/psychodrama

formulas it emulates.

Encouraged by

international

interest and

critical

acclaim, it is

obvious that

Austrian

filmmakers

are now

aiming at

wider popular

reception, and

are tailoring

some films to capture the English-speaking

audience. While this is not a detrimental

development in principle, the highly diluted

“Austrian” co-productions of the mid-1960s

should also serve as a warning. Those films,

made to appeal to the widest possible audience

and the lowest common denominator of

entertainment value, subsequently jettisoned

any national style, quality, or subject and

helped bring about the demise of the Austrian

film industry during the decade. The most

potentially marketable feature film of 2002 was



an Austrian/German co-production from the

most commercial Austrian company, Dor-Film.

Stefan Ruzowitzky’s All the Queen’s Men, an

English-language comedy-drama set in 1944

Berlin, relates the fictionalized story of four

Allied soldiers disguised as women who attempt

to steal the German Enigma coding machine.

The film’s international cast alone should have

moved the film beyond festivals and into wide

release, but poor foreign distribution hampered

by corporate fears surrounding the still

untested reputation of Austrian commercial

film killed off its potential. It may however join

Ruzowitzky’s 1998 New Heimatfilm, Die

Siebtelbauern/The One-Seventh Farmers (aka The

Inheritors, an allegory of interwar Austrian

sociopolitical strife played out between

landowning farmers and farm workers) as one

of the few Austrian films widely available to

English-speaking viewers through video/DVD

release.14

Michael Haneke’s work has stimulated

international cinema discourse on a level not

seen since the French New Wave or New

German Cinema. His breakthrough as a

filmmaker came with his very first feature, Der

siebente Kontinent/The Seventh Continent (1989),

which along with two later films, Benny’s Video

(1992) and 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des

Zufalls/71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

(1994), form a trilogy on the social alienation

and narcissism nurtured by the age of video

and computers. His sparse, even cold

directorial style serves to portray what he

suggests is Austria’s “emotional glaciation.”15

Firmly couched in psychology and the social

drama genre tradition, which he then

deconstructs and subverts, Haneke’s revelation

of the pain that lurks beneath the daily life of

the bourgeoisie and the horrors it may spawn





was shockingly evident with Kontinent, wherein

the director, with the distance of icy logic,

follows a family as it prepares and commits

mass suicide — its journey to the “seventh

continent.” Benny’s Video also takes on the

isolation of contemporary life, this time

through the mind-numbing effects of video

games, which have become the obsession of the

young son of a wealthy family. Having lost

touch with reality, he plots and performs the

murder of a young girl. Unlike the family-based

disasters brought on by consumerism, 71

Fragmenteexamines the entire hierarchy of

society. Haneke posits that the film is not

populated by characters but by surface

representations of the “fears, desires, and

fantasies of the spectators,” and that he did not

want to suggest “realism” but aimed towards

creating a paradigmatic model. For Haneke,

only the fragment can suggest reality, and his

role as a director is seen as the provider of a

simple construct by which the audience can

interpret meaning and integrate the story into a

value system. The film must not come to an

artificial end but should continue into audience

reception:

In short, a film as such does not exist, it

comes to exist only in the minds of the

spectators. A film’s essential feature, its

criterion of quality, should be its ability to

become the productive center of an

interactive process…. I attempt to provide

an alternative to the totalizing productions

that are typical of the entertainment cinema

of American provenance.16

Haneke’s theoretical influence beyond Bresson

is clear: the fragmentary, subjective concept of

Viennese Impressionism; the distancing effects

of Brechtian theater; and finally, the rejection of




the false totality of art that Walter Benjamin

saw as a strong contribution to the

aesthetic/political aim of fascism. Haneke also

regards “beautiful” films to be a “banality” and

a detriment to the precision of image, the result

of the advertising aesthetic. Haneke claims that

his films have less explicit violence than an

average detective story, but it is the

confrontation with self-deception that makes

them seem more violent than other films.

It was

Funny

Games

(right),

Haneke’s 1997 film, that would prove his point.

Although showing no explicit violence, this

deconstruction of the traditional thriller in

which a couple and their young son arrive at

their vacation home and are subsequently met

by two well-mannered but bored young men

who slowly menace the family and ultimately

kill them, offers no safety net for the audience.

Unlike the resolution found in mainstream

thrillers, no order is restored, no reason is

plumbed, and the viewer is left to contemplate

the relationship between the media and

escalating social violence. Funny Games has

been regarded as a film that spearheaded

international film festival interest on Austrian

cinema in the 1990s, especially after it became

the first Austrian feature to be accepted in

competition at Cannes since the 1960s. It was

subsequently sold to more than thirty countries,

an “unprecedented figure for an Austrian



feature in recent times.”17

Haneke’s most widely seen films, however,

demonstrate his postmodern trans-national

hybridity as a German-born filmmaker in

Austria who utilizes French casts. Code

Inconnu/Code Unknown (1999) comments on a

European collision of idealized unification and

continuing exclusionary nationalisms. Die

Klavierspielerin/The Piano Teacher (2000) is

based on Elfriede Jelinek’s “chamber piece for

three people”18 but focuses on Isabelle Huppert

as Erika Kohut, a proper and demanding

Viennese music professor who enjoys attention

and respect while tolerating a cruel mother

(Annie Girardot) and finding release through

harrowing sexual abuse, voyeurism, and

sadomasochistic sexual fantasies about

punishment. When a charming student (Benoit

Magimel) enters her life and attempts a

relationship with her, she insists on controlling

their sexual encounters to the point that it

becomes an abusive power play. Ultimately she

reveals her bondage desires and rejects his

declaration of love. Frustrated and unable to

find the nurturing, even tender sexual

relationship he seeks with her, the student

beats and abandons her. Intending to stab him

with a knife during a public recital, she instead

turns the weapon on herself and flees the

concert hall into the night. The film is

reassuringly raised into the realm of high

culture for the audiences through the beauty of

the piano performances, but this is abruptly

smashed by Kohut’s incongruent and

claustrophobically presented sadomasochism,

for which there is no resolution or salvation.

Haneke’s brisk cutting between moments of

elegant recitals, troubled academic

relationships, violent personal arguments, self-

abuse, voyeurism, and sexual acts takes on a





musical pattern of theme and variation on

public persona and private truths, which finally

collide and overlap. Although sex and sexuality

are at the core of the film, it is unerotic and

disturbing for its obvious joylessness and

mechanical quality. Like the “violence” in his

earlier films, which remained implicit, the sex

scenes in Klavierspielerin are shot so that

actions are obscured and the film has no nudity

except during Erika’s genital self-mutilation and

beating. While it is obvious that Jelinek’s

character is her metaphor for what she deems

are the sadomasochistic, if not fascistic

impulses in alienated contemporary Austrian

society — self-denial, sacrifice to high-art and

culture, unbending social etiquette and role

playing, resentment and self-abuse/punishment

— the director denies that he has created any

symbolism at all. Speaking before the audience

at the Los Angeles premiere, Haneke insisted

that he is fascinated with the “extremes” of

human experience in society, and did not set

out to create any political statements.19

Haneke’s follow-up to Klavierspielerinwas

Wolfzeit/The Time of the Wolf (2003, right), a

film noted for its unusually dark

cinematography. It revisits the family-under-

siege theme of his breakthrough Funny Games




by way of Jean-Luc Godard’s apocalyptic 1967

classic Week-End, as a middle-class family flees

an unspecified disaster to the illusion of safety

in their country home. Another crisis-society

film that symbolically responded to the

upheaval in Austrian politics is Franz Novotny’s

Yu (2002), based on material by Bernhard

Seiters and written by Novotny and Michael

Grimm. The film looks at three thirty-something

friends whose joy ride to Trieste in a Porsche is

transformed by the sudden violence of growing

civil unrest. Also relating to the change in

Austria’s image at home and abroad are the

themes of ethnic and psychological self-

realization, which pervade the films of several

new feature director/writers. A standout among

these is Mein Russland/My Russia (2002), the

first feature film by short director and

physician Barbara Gräftner. Basing the story on

her brother’s marriage to a Ukranian, she

presents a divorced middle-aged Viennese

woman who resists her son’s marriage to a

Russian girl. Gräftner’s tragicomedy arises from

the clash of what she sees as pragmatic, even

metaphysical Russians with prejudicial, goal-

oriented Austrians. While she looks forward to

“greeting old neighbors again,” in the Eastern

expansion of the New Europe, she is pessimistic

about Western economic imperialism and its

destructive effects on “the Slavic soul.”20

Also dealing with Eastern Europe is Goran

Rebic, who abandoned his rough-edged

documentary style with Donau/Danube (2003),

an elegiac fable that reconnects Vienna with the

East. Rebic traces the final trip of a rusty

Austrian freighter, its grizzled captain, and its

vivid Ship of Fools-like collection of passengers

down the great river to the Black Sea.

A parliamentary session on the future of




Austrian film was called in July 2002, with

noted producers, directors, critics, and actors

presenting views regarding government

financing and promotion of film. This was to be

a major political advance for the industry,

which despite the increase of its global

importance faces a decrease of its already

poverty-level financing at home. The center-

right national government of the People’s Party

(ÖVP) and the Freedom Party (FPÖ) coalition,

which came to power in 1999 and collapsed due

to the Freedom Party’s leadership strife, was

returned to power after national elections in

November 2002 and long-winded negotiations

in early 2003. The previous coalition had cut

state funding, particularly in the film sector, by

37 percent between 2000 and 2001.21 The

government nonetheless referred to the session

as the realization of their “responsibility” to the

Austrian film industry in hopes of initiating a

“new era” in Austrian film production.22 But

just as Austrian State Secretary for Media Franz

Morak praised the reemergence of Austrian

film, funding was cut again. Federal support

and promotion of film production had been late

in coming (1980), and it continues at the lowest

level in Europe. The Vienna municipal

government has, however, attempted to

provide support for various aspects of Austrian

film since its short-lived city-run Stadthalle

studio/production company of the early 1960s.

In recent years, it has also been instrumental in

expanding the possibilities of film education. In

2003 it granted the Filmschule Wien (Film

School Vienna) 235,000 Euros to introduce

innovative degree programs in lighting design,

production coordination, and dubbing, all of

which had been previously unavailable to

students in Vienna. The regional film industry

has also shown interest in the future of New





Austrian Film, at least symbolically: Cine

Culture Carinthia, the film promotion

organization in the province of Carinthia,

announced its “Young Movie Carinthia”

initiative, which would earmark a modest 1

percent of its overall film promotion budget for

limited productions by artists under the age of

twenty-eight. For his part, State Secretary

Morak announced the federal government

would offer up to ten film scholarships per year

(for a total of 95,000 Euros) beginning in 2003,

to promote young filmmakers and provide

“fresh impetus for the Austrian film industry.”23

One of the

most

controversial

films shot in

2002 and

continuing to

resonate

beyond 2003 is

Haider lebt —

1. April

2021/Haider

Lives — April

1, 2021 (right), which was privately financed

and directed by Peter Kern. The satire attacks

both Jörg Haider and the U.S. relationship with

Iraq by reframing Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s

notorious all-star 1952 futuristic satire on Allied

occupation, 1. April 2000.24 Although quickly

and cheaply produced, Kern’s film displays an

imaginative iconoclasticism that has made it a

modest cult hit. After twenty years of Haider’s

rule, Austria has been placed on the roster of

outlaw states, and has been invaded by U.S.

troops. Johnny Bush, the fictional son of the

former U.S. President, now controls occupied

Austria, where all freedom of expression is

banned, Viennese dialect is forbidden, and the





dollar has replaced the Euro. A German

television reporter (August Diehl) searches the

enervated landscape to find the missing Haider

and comes across several aging remnants of the

Austrian political scene of 2002-03. In a sharp

parody of Oskar Werner’s discovery of the

“book people” in a world that forbids books in

Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (GB 1966),

Diehl finds such famous Austrian literati and

film figures as Peter Turrini, Marlene

Streeruwitz, and Helmut Berger, wandering

through the Vienna Woods, reciting forbidden

Austrian literature and keeping the dialect

alive. In another cinematic intertext, this time

suggesting Carol Reed’s The Third Man (GB

1949), Diehl arranges for Haider’s funeral, but

the former politician reappears to foment a

disastrous ending. The film’s depiction of the

withering of individual freedoms and

indigenous culture for an ideological

“liberation” through foreign occupation

comments on a national experience (the

Anschluss and postwar occupation) Austrians

have only rarely approached in cinema (Axel

Corti’s bleak 1986Welcome in Vienna was one of

the few exceptions). The ease with which it is

now presented in the medium corresponds

with the more recent national discourse on

Austria’s role in Nazism and on its postwar

occupation, but it also suggests New Austrian

Film’s ability to reach a relatively large

audience with controversial sociopolitical

viewpoints. Kern’s film also encourages the

renewed notion of private investment

productions. The modes of American

independent film production and shrinking

government support have given rise to the very

un-European idea of the self-produced, low-

budget feature film across the continent. But

the Austrians have been here before and made



it work. Following the collapse of the Austrian

commercial film industry in the 1960s, private

funding was the only alternative for

filmmakers up to1980 and the subsequent

growth of Austria’s national television network,

ORF, as a co-production partner. Christian

Mehofer’s debut film, Die dritte Minute/The

Third Minute (2003), will certainly test the

viability of the return of this concept. Inspired

by a Kurt Tucholsky poem, the film deals with

two Hitler Youths who are trapped in a cellar

with a hidden Jewish girl during the final days

of the war. This complex character study about

propaganda, independent thought, and basic

human relations was rejected by several

production companies that believed Mehofer’s

name was “too small” for a story that would be

so “expensive and large” to mount.25 Refusing

to abandon the project, the director and his

cinematographer Alexander Boboschewski

raised a small budget of about 13,000 Euros and

managed to hire a full production team with

thirty-five actors, including one star performer,

Fritz von Friedl, who was so taken by the

enthusiasm for the production that accepted

the role of the Nazi officer.

Ruth

Mader’s feature debut, Struggle (2003), offers

two colliding storylines scripted by Mader with

Barbara Albert and Martin Leidenfrost: an




impoverished Polish woman who has moved to

Austria to build a better life for herself and her

young daughter with factory and farm labor

meets a wealthy, divorced Austrian who seeks

diversion from his lonely life through

sadomasochistic game playing. Abandoning a

classical narrative form for the sake of an “anti-

dramatic” exploration of the dehumanization

and alienation of various work environments,

the two intersecting stories also relate the clash

of classes and geopolitical worlds: the woman

represents the impoverished yet hopeful

Eastern Europe; the man embodies a hollow

consumerist and “emotionally bankrupted”

West. Mader flatly dismisses the critics who

compare her film style to Haneke, Seidl, or a

mix of both. Unlike their male gaze, which is

voyeuristic and often dialogue laden, Mader

and other women in New Austrian Film such as

Albert or Hausner utilize a more neutral,

distant camera and leave much to the

imagination. Mader believes that film plots are

best served by silent images and visages, and

through intelligent editing. Since much of what

she desires to show cannot even be conveyed

with words, dialogue is noticeably scarce in her

work. Mader also rails against television, which

in its expedient product orientation has

“ruined” actors for the thoughtful, detailed

work of motion pictures.26

The headlining of Austrian feature projects at

international festivals, so unthinkable just a

few years earlier, now generates wide

anticipation. An example of this is Barbara

Albert’s Böse Zellen/Free Radicals (2003), an

Austrian/German/Swiss co-production, which

received its world premiere at the Locarno Film

Festival in October 2003. Albert’s film takes on

the same illusions of control Gräftner rails

against in Mein Russland, Mader dispels in




Struggle, and Albert questions in Nordrand. As

inNordrand, Albert again shows her virtuosity

in working with an ensemble cast and in

examining the topic of contemporary

alienation. Five years after being the sole

survivor of an airline disaster in the Gulf of

Mexico, Manu finds herself living in a small

town in Austria. As the film hovers between the

complex results of existentialism and a

suggestion of incomprehensible fatalism, it

becomes apparent that the individuals, who are

part of the chance mosaic of relationships her

survival and ultimate death have caused, must

learn to appreciate life. A specific New Austrian

Film style and feel, at least among female

directors, is crystallized in Albert’s work for

American critic Ed Halter: “quiet, cool, and

subjective, [these films] achieve a detached,

contemplative air so rarely attempted by

overcompensating American cinema,

communicating a bittersweet beauty through

the simple evocation of interior life.”27 Michael

Haneke’s Caché/Hidden (2005), however, has

opened debate about the American reception of

contemporary European filmmaking. His study

of a Parisian couple unhinging in the paranoia

caused by surveillance videos anonymously

deposited at their front door was made in

France with French actors, but the film, with its

Austrian director/writer and crew, is regarded

as Austrian even by the French. A critical and

popular success across the continent, Caché

found gold at Cannes and garnered the awards

for Best European Film and Best European

Director at the 2005 European Academy

Awards, but it was rejected as Austria’s official

entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar of

2005 because it was shot in French. Perhaps the

controversy surrounding this unpopular

decision may have shown Hollywood that its




outdated notion of foreign film and its own

monolingual cinema is not the reality of the art

anywhere else on the planet, and that in this

postmodern world, the choice of a director to

shoot a film in a language or a country other

than that of the film’s origin is simple artistic

choice — a demonstration of the power of

cinema to transcend.

Vienna has

“outpaced

even Berlin in

terms of

cinema seats

per capita,”28

due to the

multiplex

boom and the

revitalization

of abandoned

theaters as art

house or

program cinemas. Despite the cuts in film

funding, audiences now flock to festivals and

retrospectives, inspiring innovations like St.

Pölten’s Cinema Paradiso, which is not only

aimed at presenting art-house screenings

(complete with an additional bistro/screening

room and a café), but can provide multimedia

spaces for readings, cabaret, musical, and small

theatrical performances. The Hollywood

onslaught continues to captivate a large portion

of the ticket buyers (if not the critics), as it does

for most of Europe, but the success of New

Austrian Film and the return of audiences to

the cinema should not be measured by box

office earnings, but by the enthusiasm and

visibility greeting the art in national discourse.

This was tested throughout 2003 and ignited by

State Secretary Morak’s replacement of the

Graz-based Diagonale Film Festival’s leadership




with Miroljub Vuckovic, ex-program director of

the Belgrade International Film Festival and

Tillmann Fuchs, former head of Austria’s first

private television network, ATV. The sudden

shift of the festival’s mission from a showcase

of Austrian film to a cash prize awarding

platform encouraging television-linked films

and South-Eastern European production was

greeted with anger by most Austrian

filmmakers who had not been consulted and

who suspected that the restructuring was an

attempt to silence demands for increased

federal film funding. By shifting the Diagonale’s

emphasis to television co-production, a new

television film promotional fund could be

utilized and the government might more

distinctly monitor subsequent product. Morak

claimed that a planned “media fund” to

stimulate private film investment needed

further discussion and that funding policies

would be governed by Euro regulations. He

ignored the petition to reinstate the former

directors and pleaded with the industry to let

Vuckovic and Fuchs get on with their work. But

filmmakers in Austria and abroad considered

this the worst example of the federal

government’s disregard of the film industry. By

autumn of 2003, opposition political parties

demanded Morak’s team quit, and a “protest

Diagonale” (based on the original event) had

been formed by Ruth Beckermann, Ulrich Seidl,

and Barbara Albert (above). With over two

hundred films entered into the “protest ”

festival, and with statements of solidarity

arriving from other European film

organizations and festivals, the host city Graz

announced that it would not support the new

Diagonale. Morak admitted defeat, the directors

of his new festival resigned, and the original

Diagonale was reinstated as the official event.



This massing of filmmakers, actors, and

technicians as a politically engaged and united

front in the atmosphere of a rebirth of both the

industry and popular film interest would have

been considered unlikely, even a few years

earlier. It provides the most impressive

harbinger that Austria has indeed once again

become a “film nation.”

It is clear that the new era in Austrian film has

been in the making for some time, emerging

from the impecunious experiments of the 1970s

to current global interest, and developing

through artistic and theoretical concerns rather

than for commercial interests. Much of this

journey is also based in the development of the

Austrian nation during the past several

decades, as its society wrestles with identity

and geopolitical role. A significant factor

however, for film as for national identity, is the

new desire to look back to the traditions,

innovations, and talents Austrian cinema has

had, and has shared with the world.

1. Quoted in Martin

Schweighofer,

“Introduction,”

Austrian Films 1998

(Vienna: Austrian

Film Commission,

1998): 6. [↩]

2. The historical

studies of Walter

Fritz provided the

only substantial

volumes on

Austrian film

history from the

1960s into the

1990s. With the re-emergence of Austrian film, there

has been a significant increase in published studies.

Gertraud Steiner offered a government-published

survey of Austrian film history in Film Book Austria

(Vienna: Federal Press Office, 1997), and has also

written an excellent study on the

http://brightlightsfilm.com/austria-hungry-return-film-nation/#identifier_0_14206



AustrianHeimatfilm:Die Heimat-Macher: Kino in

Österreich 1946-1966(Wien: Verlag für

Gesellschaftskritik, 1987). The Film Archive Austria has

issued several well-produced film, director, era, and

genre studies, often coupled with video releases of

restored film documents, and more contemporary film

has been examined in Gottfried Schlemmer, ed., Der

neue Österreichische Film (Wien: Wespennest, 1996).

Elisabeth Büttner and Christian Dewald have attempted

to examine Austrian film history in a

thematic/theoretical frame in their two-volume

Anschluss an Morgen. Eine Geschichte des

österreichischen Films von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart

(Salzburg: Residenz, 1997) and Das tägliche Brennen.

Eine Geschichte des österreichischen Films von den

Anfängen bis 1945 (Salzburg: Residenz, 2002). [↩]

3. See my profile “Louise Kolm-Fleck” in the Great

Directors Series section of Senses of Cinema for

information on her life and work. [↩]

4. See Armin Loacker and Martin Prucha, eds.,

Unerwünschtes Kino: Der deutschsprachige

Emigrantenfilm 1934-1937 (Wien: Filmarchiv Austria,

2000). [↩]

5. See my study, “Wien-Film, Karl Hartl, and Mozart:

Aspects of the Failure of Nazi

IdeologicalGleichschaltung in Austrian Film,” Modern

Austrian Literature. Special Issue: Austria in Film 32.3-4

(1999): 177-88. [↩]

6. Goswin Dörfler, “Austria,” International Film Guide

1977, ed. Peter Cowie (London: Tantivy Press, 1977): 80.

[↩]

7. Gottfried Schlemmer, “Das alte Vertreiben,” Der neue

Österreichische Film, ed. Gottfried Schlemmer (Wien:

Wespennest, 1996): 9-14. [↩]

8. Film-friendly City Councilor for the Arts Andreas

Mailath-Pokorny greeted the popularity of the

museum’s retrospectives with a half-million Euro

increase in funding from the city of Vienna. Michael

Omasta, “Hinter verschlossenen Türen: Alexander

Horwath Interview,” Falter 1 (2002) online. [↩]

9. Herbert Muschamp, “Architecture Review: A Gift of

Vienna That Skips the Schlag,” New York Times 19 Apr.

2002, online. [↩]

10. Jennifer Senior, “Mostly Not Mozart,” New York

Magazine 22 Apr. 2002, online. [↩]

11. Carol Strickland, “Austria Makes Soaring Debut on the

New York Arts Scene,” The Christian Science Monitor 19

Apr. 2002 online. [↩]

12. Ed Halter, “Das Experiment,” The Village Voice 12-18

Nov. 2003, online. [↩]














13. Ibid. [↩]

14. For an examination of the ideological shifts behind the

filmic vocabulary of the rebornHeimatfilm, see my

article, “Going Home Again? Ruzowitzky’s Die

Siebtelbauern and the New Austrian Heimatfilm,” The

Germanic Review. 78.2 Spring (2003): 133-47. [↩]

15. Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel, eds, The BFI

Companion to German Cinema (London: BFI, 1999): 129.

[↩]

16. Michael Haneke, “71 Fragments of a Chronology of

Chance: Notes to the Film,” After Postmodernism:

Austrian Literature and Film in Transition, ed. Willy

Riemer. (Riverside: Ariadne, 2000): 171-72. [↩]

17. Beat Glur, “Austria,” Variety International Film Guide

1999, ed. Peter Cowie (London: Faber and Faber, 1999):

92. [↩]

18. Matthias Greuling, “Die letzten Zuckungen des Tieres,”

Interview mit Michael Haneke, Celluloid2 2002, online.

[↩]

19. Commentary from an audience discussion with Michael

Haneke following the screening of Die Klavierspielerin

(right) at the American Cinematheque/Egyptian

Theater, Los Angeles, 23 Nov. 2001. [↩]

20. “Mein Russland: Ein Filmdebut aus

Österreich,”Celluloid 4 2002: 10-15. [↩]

21. Roman Scheiber, “Austria,” Variety International Film

Guide 2002, ed. Peter Cowie. (London: Variety, 2002): 85.

[↩]

22. See Brigitte Povysil, “Parlamentarische Enquete zur

Zukunft des Österreichischen Films,” APA-OTS Press

Service, 23 May 2002, online. [↩]

23. “Promotion of the Austrian Film Industry,” News From

Austria, Austrian Federal Press Service, 16 Dec. 2002,

online. [↩]

24. For various examinations of this sci-fi/fantasy film,

which pleads for the return of Austrian sovereignty by

projecting Austria’s revolt against an Allied occupation

that has lasted into the year 2000, see Ernst Kieninger

et al., eds, 1. April 2000, Edition Film und Text 2 (Wien:

Filmarchiv Austria, 2000). [↩]

25. Clemens Stampf, “Eine neue Hoffnung des

österreichischen Films?” Celluloid 4 2003: 30. [↩]

26. Matthias Greuling, “Der Existenzkampf wird härter:

Ruth Mader” Celluloid 2 2003: 10-13. [↩]

27. Halter. [↩]

28. Roman Scheiber, “Austria,” Variety International Film

Guide 2003, ed. Peter Cowie (London: Button, 2003):

108. [↩]



















PREVIOUS STORY

Unadaptable: A

NEXT STORY

Ann-Margret in

— Robert von

Dassanowsky

Robert von Dassanowsky is

Professor of German and Film

and director of the Film

Studies Program at the

University of Colorado,

Colorado Springs. He has

served as the editor of The

Gale Encyclopedia of

Multicultural America, 2nd Ed.

and editorial advisor to the

International Dictionary of

Films and Filmmakers. His

examinations of film and

literature have appeared in

widely in journals and

anthologies. His most recent

books are Austrian Cinema: A

History (2005), New Austrian

Film (co-ed with Oliver C.

Speck, 2011) and Hugo von

Hofmannsthal's Der Schwierige

Revisited (co-ed with Martin

Liebscher and Christophe

Fricker, 2011). Forthcoming

are edited collections on

Tarantino's Inglourious

Basterds, World Film

Locations: Vienna, and his

book Screening Transcendence:

Film under Austrofascism

1933-38. Dassanowsky is also

active as an independent film

producer.

http://brightlightsfilm.com/unadaptable-fatal-problem-human-stain/

http://brightlightsfilm.com/ann-margret-wonderland-bates-brits-home-return-soldier/

http://brightlightsfilm.com/author/robertvondassanowsky/

http://www.amazon.com/Austrian-Cinema-Robert-Von-Dassanowsky/dp/0786437332/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1306553091&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/New-Austrian-Film-Robert-Dassanowsky/dp/1845457005/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1306553130&sr=1-3

http://www.amazon.com/Quentin-Tarantinos-Inglourious-Basterds-Manipulation/dp/1441138692/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1306553130&sr=1-1



Fatal Problem

with The

Human Stain

Wonderland:

But Bates and

the Brits Are at

Home in The

Return of the

Soldier

TheVanishingRemade:From theDesire ofBeing to theBurial ofHumanSubjectivityOctober 31,

2004

Rosetta:Learning toSee

January 28,

2015

DeadlyCrawl: TheVelocity ofGary

November

1, 1999

TheBeautifuland theDarned:AvengingTWILIGHTOctober 28,

2009

ALSO IN BRIGHT LIGHTS

http://brightlightsfilm.com/unadaptable-fatal-problem-human-stain/

http://brightlightsfilm.com/ann-margret-wonderland-bates-brits-home-return-soldier/

http://brightlightsfilm.com/the-vanishing-remade-from-the-desire-of-being-to-the-burial-of-human-subjectivity/

http://brightlightsfilm.com/rosetta-learning-to-see-dardenne-brothers-1999-dvd/

http://brightlightsfilm.com/deadly-crawl-velocity-gary/

http://brightlightsfilm.com/the-beautiful-and-the-darned-avenging-twilight/



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Austria Hungry: Return of a Film Nation. Vienna’s Forgotten Influence and New Austrian Film

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