2021 Doc Route: Austria Doc Route: Austria
Film implies movement – of images, memories, and (hi)stories. Being in motion, and perhaps a rejection of boundaries can be pinned down as film’s basic conditions. Thereby they simultaneously disclose the idea of a national cinematography as, at any rate, contradictory.
So how to trace it?
Illustrative for Austrian documentary film from 2010 to 2020, the “Doc route” programme focuses on views from the outside, and those looking out. Approaches, that gather under the banner “Austrian documentary film” and at the same time, lead it ad absurdum: views from the curiously driven, from new and long-established Austrians, from film professionals and amateurs. Views from the present into possible pasts. Glances that wander from here into the future.
A film from the early 2000s precedes the programme: Lisl Ponger’s Phantom Foreign Vienna, a montage of a Super 8 journal of everyday life in Vienna. Nearly all nations and ethnicities are represented in Austria’s capital. Ponger captured the forms, rituals, and practices of their gatherings, the preservation of identity, celebrating (togetherness), dancing – being in motion.
In this way, her film becomes a reflection of the programme as a whole: infused with real as well as cinematic movements of desire, escape, and travel, Austrian cinema proves to be a transit land, situatedness as a kind of temporary in-between state.
In six programmes, twelve films (seven feature films, five short films) give an idea of Austrian documentary cinema. This limitation to only a few works is fortunate: it foils from the start any type of representativeness and all the trap doors associated with it. And yet, names are missing, such as Ulrich Seidl or Michael Glawogger and Patric Chiha, whose unique styles have contributed significantly to Austrian film’s international reputation. Focus is instead on films that have, in part, rarely been seen, unjustly – Bernadette Weigel’s grandiose essay Fair Wind – Notes of a Traveller, for example, or Ivette Löcker’s When It Blinds, Open Your Eyes. Or early films in which later careers were already laid out (And There We Are, In The Middle by Sebastian Brameshuber) as well as films that embark on a search for clues about what’s behind the images (How We Live – Messages to the Family by Gustav Deutsch, Doppelgänger by Michaela Taschek, The Pimp and His Trophies by Antoinette Zwirchmayr, Operation Jane Walk by Robin Klengel and Leonhard Müllner). A striking number of the gathered works have chosen analogue film as their form of artistic expression (Notes from the Underworld by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, etc.), and a considerable number of works are represented in the Austrian film distributor sixpackfilm’s remarkable portfolio. To derive an overriding trend from this wouldn’t be right as the work of other distributors of Austrian film (Filmladen, Stadtkino, Filmdelights, Filmgarten) is too valuable. Nonetheless, the individual, courageous, in-part experimental, yet in any case all singular formal approaches are a basis for contemplating the background of Austrian cinema, and for getting to understanding Austria a bit better.
Viewed from the outside, in terms of its structure, Austrian film is frequently described as greatly privileged. A film funding law has been in effect since 1980, which can be interpreted as cultural policy’s commitment to a functioning, steadily working film industry as well as to Austrian auteur cinema. With the so-called “small film funding”, the big brother in the Austrian Film Institute has a funding pool at its side, which – albeit chronically under-endowed – helps to make short and experimental formats financially possible. A rather unique situation in the international context.
While Austrian documentary film, like fiction film, has had international success at festivals, its significance within Austria is nonetheless negligible and many works, for the most part, remain largely unseen. Despite a strong (arthouse) cinema infrastructure, now as in the past, the numbers at the local box office are low, a situation further intensified by Covid-19. As the film scholar Christa Blümlinger once opined, there is a general lack of sensitivity in Austria for a medium that questions reality and reflects on social conditions. Her comment on the repression of documentary film in Austria can be read as a blueprint for the nation’s identity. Far too long Austria reacted to its own war guilt by neglecting it and looking away. The theory of Austria as the first victim of national socialism first began to waver on a broad basis with Kurt Waldheim’s campaign for the presidency in 1986. In the wake of the revelation of Waldheim’s initially concealed activities as an SA officer during World War II, politics as well as civil society had to reflect upon the responsibility of Austrian citizens in the atrocities of the Shoah. For a public oriented on art and culture, and within Austrian film in particular, this phase functioned as a moment of politicization. Previously, film had done its part to help shape an atmosphere of forgetting and repression – Austria’s myth of victimhood and innocence: idyllic Alps, “Heimat” films and kitsch cinema dominated the film landscape of the post-war years and were commissioned by public authorities to promote this specific image and tourism. First beginning in the seventies, motion pictures advanced under the label “new Austrian film” to an active constant within a greater counter-culture rebellion. Filmmakers such as Ruth Beckermann, who is represented in the programme with two films, honed her profile in this phase and advanced to become a figurehead for a politically wide awake and critical auteur cinema that also attains international recognition (her recent film Waldheim’s Waltz being the ultimate consequence of this development). They became role models for subsequent generations by radically deconstructing the sacrosanct national identity as a whole and formulating with extreme clarity, even as an imperative: “forget Austria”– and with that, also labels and borders, both formal and geographical. Or: reflect and thematize Austria, its history, its conditions, as Nikolaus Geyrhalter suggests in his epic long-time observation Over the Years.
In this sense, the present programme yields no clear map, but instead, suggests a route that tends to travel beyond the obvious: from the Viennese underworld to the animated urban canyons of New York. From friends to families and loved ones. In between: dancing, driving, smoking, lingering… A programme as a sensuous offer of a cinematic chance acquaintance – with Austria and the world.
Sebastian Höglinger
A programme by Sebastian Höglinger (Diagonale Festival, Graz) and Christophe Postic.
In the presence of Sebastian Höglinger. With support from the Paris Forum Culturel Autrichien.