Dieter Berner

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 »

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The day-to-day routines of a seemingly ordinary Austrian family begin to take on a sinister complexion in Michael Haneke’s chilling portrait of bourgeois anomie giving way to shocking self-destruction. Inspired by a true story, the director’s first theatrical feature finds him fully in command of his style, observing with clinical detachment the spiritual emptiness of consumer culture—and the horror that lurks beneath its placid surfaces. The Seventh Continent builds to an annihilating encounter with the televisual void that powerfully synthesizes Haneke’s ideas about the link between violence and our culture of manufactured emotion.Read More »

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Three members of a middle-class family are followed as their lifestyle slowly disintegrates. Nothing spectacular happens: it’s just the dreary un-ending grind of a go-nowhere existence. The film’s final scene emulates Fassbinder, as the threesome bid auf wiedersehn to everyone and everything in a gaudy, grotesque manner. It goes without saying that Der 7. Kontinent is not for everyone’s taste.Read More »