Voice From BFI wrote:
Favoriten: the classroom becomes a model for society in Ruth Beckermann’s compassionate documentary
Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann takes an unhurried and optimistic approach to documenting a class of primary school children in the working-class Viennese neighbourhood of Favoriten.Read More »
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Die Rebellion (The Rebellion). 1993. Austria. Directed by Michael Haneke. With its silent-era aesthetic of sepia tones and muted color tints, and its interweaving of realism and fantasy, Haneke’s haunting adaptation of Joseph Roth’s expressionistic 1924 novel is an homage to the great Weimar cinema of G. W. Pabst and F. W. Murnau. In a heartbreaking performance, Branko Samarovski plays Andreas Pum, a soldier who loses his leg during the Great War and becomes an organ-grinder to earn a few coins a day. To this loyal citizen of the State, the veterans and firebrands who march in protest against society’s neglect are lazy, insubordinate “heathens.” But when an ugly tram incident condemns Pum to a life of penury and loneliness, his soul is awakened to the bitter waste of a life spent in duty to God and Empire. In German; 90 minRead More »
Description from the University of Massachussetts website:
This two-part drama examines the fate of Haneke’s own generation which came of age after World War II. The first part depicts the generational gap between 1950s teenagers and their parents while the second shows this same group of characters twenty years later as they have grown up to be dysfunctional and suicidal adults. Regarded as the most significant of Haneke’s early works, Lemmings contains incipient treatments of many of the themes he would later elaborate on in his theatrical features.Read More »
Haneke unplugged – consistent themes, early, bare-bones exploration.
The dark mood is set in the first scene: the vandalizing of cars. At once a deeply anti-bourgeois impulse and an act that expresses the faceless anomie of the post-war generation, this film is a melodramatic exploration of teenage resistance to overbearing parents and the constricting influence of a too-small Austrian town. Haneke upends Arcadia (youthful innocence) by transgressing boundaries such as sex out of marriage; smoking; and adultery with an adult. His teens damage cars and otherwise passive-aggressively act against parents. Haneke then subverts the bourgeois fiction of happiness and security by suggesting that in the end our own self-absorption and lack of empathy will relegate our relationships to hostile acts. Read More »
imdb:
Gonzalo is a farmer living with his family in a small village in Castile, in the north of Spain. The ancient and sage tradition of producing their food, from the slaughter of a pig to his own wine, has worked very well for him at this time of crisis in Spain. Sowing and harvest, like fiestas and customs, define the annual cycle, plagued with difficulties and problems but also filled with joy and gratification.Read More »
Synopsis:
‘A young doctor exiles himself to a remote Austrian village when he accidentally causes a death. Once at the village, winter sets in and against that harsh and poetic backdrop a rabies epidemic sweeps through the population. The doctor convinces people he is a biologist but then he treats someone bitten and gives his real profession away. As the epidemic raises questions of life and death, the doctor’s mind is brought back to the death that caused his exile and he considers suicide for awhile. The same issues come up again when an enraged villager goes on a killing spree and in turn, is hunted by the citizens. Faced with the prevalence of death all around him, the doctor starts to gain some perspective on the personal experience that brought him here in the first place.’
– iMDbRead More »
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Foreigners Out! Schlingensief’s Container documents an experiment which provoked national political hysteria.
In the summer of 2000, the German performance artist Christoph Schlingensief placed 12 genuine refugees in a container, inside a wire cage of the steps of the Vienna Opera House. He then set up a website and invited Viennese to log on and vote one out each day, Big Brother style, for deportation. 800,000 Austrians did so.Read More »
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“Dreams Rewired,” a montage of clips from nearly 200 vintage films, is a lively, visually enthralling attempt to gaze into the future by remembering the past. The snippets — mostly obscure excerpts from dramas, cartoons and scientific and educational films — are seamlessly fused into a whoosh of images, many of them zany, all from the 1880s to the 1930s. The later ones have sound.Read More »
Egon Schiele is one of the most provocative artists in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th Century. His life and work are driven by beautiful women and an era that is coming to an end. Two women will have a lasting impact on him – his sister and first muse Gerti, and 17 year old Wally, arguably his one true love, immortalized in his famous painting ‘Death and the Maiden’. His radical paintings scandalize Viennese society while daring artists like Gustav Klimt and art agents alike are sensing the exceptional. But he is also prepared to go beyond his own pain and to sacrifice Love and Life for his art that inspires us up to this day.Read More »