The document discusses the emergence of New Austrian Film since the 1990s. It captures how Austria's opening to Eastern Europe and reemergence as a cultural hub has inspired new artistic reflections in film. New Austrian Film rejects artificial representations of national identity, instead focusing on diversity and social criticism. It highlights several influential Austrian women filmmakers and discusses how directors like Barbara Albert, Ulrich Seidl, and others address issues of multiculturalism, identity, and social issues through their films.

1. Articles New Austrian Film
A Wave Over
Boundaries: New
Austrian Film
By Robert von Dassanowsky
Keywords: New Austrian
Film, postmodernism,
multiculturalism, Barbara
Albert, Ruth Mader, social
criticism, documentary,
Michael Haneke
There is a strong source of postmodernism
emerging from Austria, which is overtaking the
nation's traditionalist high-art image. Film of
course, is a major aspect of this new artistic
energy, and it is telling that since the 1990s,
New Austrian Film has captured critical imagi-
nations internationally. For with the opening of
eastern Europe, the return of Vienna as a hub
of central European culture, and the emer-
gence of controversial regional and federal
politics, there is much here for artistic reflec-
tion and transformation. Many critics that
greeted Austria's re-emergence in the interna-
tional film scene did so with amnesia. Austria
had once been quite a force, with regards to
an influential national cinema and in terms of
its expatriate talent. What has become clear
is that this New Wave implies a subtle shift
in Austrian national identity. Not a homoge-
neous culture, but a melange that grew from
an empire colonizing itself eastward (as the
United States, its only true mirror, colonized
itself westward1
), Austria's reduction to a small
country with an imperial superpower history
would be traumatic enough for any nation.
But given its often 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's slippery
national identity and role embraced a post-war
neutralist escapism and artificial sociocultural
reinvention. The new Europe has allowed for
the return of the polyglotism, multiculturalism
and even controversial politics to Austria. This
flux inspires and drives the Austrian visual,
and no other art can bring the postmodern
'crisis of reason' and cultural multivalence
to the masses as does film. New Austrian
Film demonstrates what Jean-Franqois Lyo-
tard considers the collapse of the totalizing
modern metanarratives, or cultural schemas,
which provides credible purpose for action, but
also ignores social heterogeneity. Lyotardians
argue for a 'multiplicity of theoretical stand-
points' (Peters 2001: 7) and local contextualiza-
tion. Given its loose collaborative rather than
manifesto-based essence, New Austrian Film
focuses widely on the diversity of the Austrian,
European and, ultimately, human experience.
The cinema of Austria has reflected a cen-
tury of national identity questions. Yet, while it
has been influential through both product and
exile talent, its contributions to the art itself
have been, until very recently, greatly neglected
by scholarship: the progressive silent-era social
dramas by female film pioneer Louise Kolm-
Fleck; monumental silent epics produced by
Sascha Kolowrat and directed by Austro-Hun-
garians Michael Curtiz and Alexander Korda;
Willi Forst and Walter Reisch's orchestration
of montage, music and melodrama of the art
world into a unique genre known as the 'Vien-
nese Film'; the independent and contempo-
rary-progressive Emigrantenjilm (Austrians and
exiled Germans making films not allowed into
Nazi Germany) of the 1930s, which featured
Hans Jaray and Franziska Gaal in co-produc-
tions with Budapest and Prague studios; the
still-controversial lavish period classics of Karl
Hartl's Wien-Film Studio during the Anschluss;
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2. Articles New Austrian Film
the post-war film boom when directors Hubert
Marsichka and Franz Antel redefined tradi-
tional entertainment genres in lavish colour.
Artists such as Paula Wessely, Hans and Paul
Hbrbiger, Hans Moser, Josef Meinrad, Waltraud
Haas, Romy Schneider, Rudolf Prack, Johanna
Matz, Peter Weck, Nadja Tiller, Gtinther Philipp,
Maria Schell, and Oskar Werner defined inter-
national stardom for the post-war nation. 2
Austria also has a stronger connection with
Hollywood's 'Golden Age' than any other
European cinema due to the large amount of
expatriate Austro-Hungarian and Austrian film
talent that worked throughout a century of
American film - from Erich von Stroheim and
Elisabeth Bergner to Hedy Lamarr and Billy
Wilder to Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann
and Senta Berger. Yet nowhere is there less
knowledge about Austrians in Hollywood than
in Austria. The nation has remained a 'hid-
den' cinematic giant with much of its talent
claimed by other national cinemas.' Again,
the multicultural, polyglot quality of the cul-
ture supports a theory: like the Americans
(withtheir world dominant cinema), Austri-
ans historically tend to be from somewhere
else. The acculturation of people in a multi-
cultural empire and in its republican succes-
sor indicates an understanding for mimicry
and individuality, role playing and storytell-
ing, revision of identity, in short, an awareness
of the 'theatre' of life. Add to that Austria's
particular affinity for the baroque, which like
the other baroque culture, Italy, and to some
extent France, translates the Schein und Sein
(appearance and being) philosophy of the
epoch into theatrically dramatic architecture,
great opera and the very essence of a grand
facade or an imagined world - motion pictures.
While New Austrian Film has had several
phases beginning in the early 1980s with the
onset of meagre national funding following
the splutter of limited narrative experimenta-
tion in the 1970s, it has become the 'hot spot'
internationally since the end of the 1990s,
when Barbara Albert's Nordrand (aka Northern
Skirts) (1999) became the first Austrian produc-
tion in decades invited to screen in competi-
tion at the Venice Film Festival. It deals with
a topic that most fascinates Albert - the loss
of innocence. Written by Albert with cinema-
tography by Christine Maier, Nordrand focuses
on two women (Nina Proll and Edita Malovcic)
whose lives attract other young people of dif-
ferent ethnic and sociocultural backgrounds:
a Romanian immigrant, a Bosnian refugee
and an Austrian who has just completed his
military service. Seeking self-realization, emo-
tional support and concerned with bringing
children into this world, they live in a hous-
ing project on Vienna's north side, and floun-
der between memories of war in the former
Yugoslavia, temporary jobs and unwanted
pregnancies until they finally drift apart. Albert
sets inserts from television news, flashbacks,
symbolic montages and spaces of imperma-
nence (bars, discos, underground passages,
shopping areas, streets) against long takes
dealing with the characters' desire for stabil-
ity and control, but no harmony is found or
projected. Albert populates her films with the
ethnicities that make up Vienna and have
always been a part of the city and the culture.
That this city is once again a hub for polyglot
central Europe seems quite natural, but Albert
also underscores the xenophobia and the
shifts in Austrian national identity that have
emerged since the fall of the bloc system. Yet it
is precisely this physical and cultural move-
ment across central/eastern Europe that has
allowed Vienna to reassert itself as an influen-
tial cinema venue by the turn of our century.
Albert returns to the communal circle in
Free Radicals (Bbse Zellen) (2003), a film created
around the idea of the 'butterfly effect'. Her
film begins with a plane crash, whose sole
survivor, Manu (played by one of the multi-
talented crossover 'stars' of the Austrian New
Wave, Kathrin Resetarits), is later killed in an
automobile accident. During her 'stolen' time
and after her death, Manu becomes the hub of
several parallel stories involving her troubled
surviving family and friends, and their haunt-
ing symbol of the irony and unpredictability of
life as they fight off abuse and loneliness. Her
more recent Fallinq (Fallen) (2006) focuses spe-
cifically on female friendship and the possibil-
ity of reinvention. Albert's lead as break-out
director is but one example of the major role
women are playing in this national cinematic
resurrection. She is the artistic 'daughter' of
Valie Export, who put the narrative back into
the alienating actionist experimentalism of
the 1960s and emerged as one of the lead-
ers of feminist film-making with a substantial
mainstream following in the 1970s. Post-1970s
32 1film international issue 31

3. Articles New Austrian Film Below Ulrich Seidl's Dog Days/Hundstage
film-makers succeeded in attracting a younger
generation whose parents had abandoned
cinema during the death of the Austrian
commercial product during the 1960s and in
the period of marginalized experimentation.
Unlike the directors of the New German Cin-
ema's Autorenfilm during the 1970s and 1980s,
who saw themselves in the tradition of the
French cinema d'auteurs in their all-controlling
combination of writer, director and producer,
Austrian multitasking, while also a rejec-
tion of commercial cinema conventions was
driven by poverty and necessity.Austria's early
film revival was mostly heralded by word-of-
mouth and the perseverance of its creators.
A growing interest in the new narrative style,
in strongly critical subject matter, and in local
production indicated the path for Austrian
film-makers into the resurgence of national
and then international interest in their art. The
Austrian New Wave, when it finally took shape,
was not wholly revolutionary, but based on
the critical re-visioning of traditional Austrian
genres: non-nostalgic period pieces, politi-
cized Heimatfilm and feminist social drama.
By the turn of the century, Austrian
film-makers were reacting to the shift-
ing identity values of the nation by expos-
ing and rejecting artificial representations,
particularly regarding national image and
social construction. Their attack focuses
on what Slavoj 2i2ek considers the
contemporary redefinition of politics as the
art of expert administration, that is, as politics
without politics, up to today's tolerant liberal
multiculturalism as an experience of the Other
deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other
who dances fascinating dances and has an
ecologically sound holistic approach to
reality, while practices like wife beating
remain out of sight ...).Virtual Reality simply
generalizes this procedure of offering a prod-
uct deprived of its substance... (Zizek 2002: 11)
It appears to be the goal of most, if not
all Austrian film-makers of this era to put
the substance, no matter how discordant or
unpleasant back into the 'product'. The tout-
ing of Austria's multicultural legacy and the
promotion of the nation as a reborn hub of an
EU Mitteleuropa, is countered by images vacil-
lating between xenophobia and self-hate, and
representations of broad economic/social suc-
cess is tempered by reactions ranging from
latent dissatisfaction to despair. Poised against
virtualization and the postmodern 'anxiety
of perceiving oneself as nonexistent',4
the
new social critical film has quickly become
the genre generally associated with current
Austrian cinema. However, this type of film-
making is less new than it appears to be. It
represents a resurfaced continuity of Austrian
film and themes regarding national identity,
national representation and socio-political/
gender role-related dissention that were pres-
ent at the very start of the national cinema.
Confronting the mainstream audience with
uncomfortable tragicomic and astringent
social-critical neo-realism set in the work-
a-day world is the hallmark of Ulrich Seidl,
whose Dog Days (Hundstage) (2001) presents
six interrelated episodes taking place during
a late summer weekend. Lurking just beneath
the facades of peaceful and tidy suburban life
are grotesque vignettes of desire, loneliness,
criminality and brutality. While the film articu-
lates contemporary Austrian social anxieties,
it is universal in its exploration of middle-class
alienation. Gbtz Spielmann's Antares (2004) is
wwwfilmint.nu 133

4. Articles New Austrian Film
'The new Europe has
allowed for the return
of the polyglotism,
multiculturalism and even
controversial politics to
Austria. This flux inspires
and drives the Austrian
visual, and no other art can
bring the postmodern 'crisis
of reason' and cultural
multivalence to the masses
as does film.'
also constructed as an episodic drama about
three couples who reside in the same hous-
ing complex and eventually cross paths. Like
Barbara Albert's Free Radicals, Antares is tied to
a cosmic notion. Unlike Albert's philosophi-
cal approach, however, Spielmann's overlap-
ping storylines are incidental and his sexually
frank and open-ended examination of seduc-
tion, jealousy, deceit and domestic violence
recalls the desolation of Seidl's Dog Days.
Also relating to the change in Austrian
politics and its image at home and abroad are
the themes of ethnic and psychological self-
realization, which pervade the films of several
new feature director/writers: Gerhard Fillei
and Joachim Krenn's The Orange Paper (2002),
the story of a man on the run for most of his
life and the brief revelation of love; Markus
Heitschl crosses film noir and French New
Wave cinematic elements in Dead Man's Memo-
ries (Der gldserne Bick) (2002), a thriller filmed
in Lisbon, about a mysterious woman captured
on a video camera found in a murder victim's
car; Chinese director Hu Mei looks at the dif-
ficult romance of an Austrian woman (Nina
Proll) and a Chinese student (Wang Zhiweng)
in 1930s Vienna in On the Other Side of the Bridge
(Am anderen Ende der BrUicke) (2002). Many of
these films are almost completely populated
by specifically ethnic casts, such as Tehran-
born AliReza Ghanie's parable about artistic
creation, The Wind Game (Windspiel) (2001) in
which the late Austrian writer H.C. Artmann
appears as an old poet mentor to a young man
searching for identity in an Iranian commu-
nity. Caspar Pfaundler's Lost and Found (2001)
was shot in Taipei utilizing a mostly Chinese
cast, and Istanbul-born Kenan Kilic offers an
all-Turkish cast in the drama of a group of legal
and illegal immigrants who frequent a Vien-
nese bar in Nachtreise (2004). A standout among
these is My Russia (Mein Russland) (2002), the
first feature film by physician Barbara Gr5ftner.
Basing the story on her own family's experi-
ence with her brother's marriage to an Ukrai-
nian, she presents a divorced middle-aged
Viennese woman who resists her son's mar-
riage to a Russian girl. Grdftner's tragicomedy
arises from the bringing together of what she
sees are the pragmatic, even metaphysical Rus-
sians and prejudicial, goal-oriented Austrians.
While Grdftner looks forward to 'greeting old
neighbours again', in the eastern expansion of
the new Europe, she is very pessimistic about
what she considers to be a western economic
imperialism that might well destroy 'the Slavic
soul'.' The film, considered by many as the
first true Dogma feature from Austria, gar-
nered the 2002 Max Ophfils Prize. J6rg Kalt's
Crash Test Dummies (2005) takes a more satirical
look at the themes of alienation and displaced
central and eastern Europeans in Vienna, as
a Romanian couple's attempt to exploit the
system turns on them and they find com-
munity among similarly exploited 'survivors'.
Ulrich Seidl's Import/Export (2006) offers yet
another take on the under-classes of the new
Europe, as a Ukrainian nurse seeks to escape
Internet-porn for a better life in Austria, while
an Austrian night watchman seeks meaning
in his life by selling video gambling machines
- in the Ukraine. Both encounter the harsh-
ness, even brutality of the new globalism, and
the director's mix of documentary and nar-
rative film delivers such grotesque tableaux
of humiliation that critics have questioned
the film's re-exploitation of those non-actors
that populate Seidl's marginal worlds.
Short experimental work that shifts the
meanings of pre-existing footage, or 'found
film', has brought international acclaim to
Peter Tscherkassky, Martin Arnold, and Gustav
Deutsch. Virgil Widrich and Lisl Ponger are
considered the artistic heirs of Austrian avant-
garde film pioneer Peter Kubelka and the more
radical Actionists of the 1960s. 6
Tscherkassky's
Cinemascope Trilogy featuring Outer Space (the
34 1film international issue 31

5. Below Barbara Grýftner's My Russia / Mein Russland
startling re-vision of footage from a banal Bar-
bara Hershey sci-fi pic), Widrich's Oscar-nom-
inated Copy Shop (2001) and Arnold's Freudian
deconstruction of Hollywood clich6 in Alone:
Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), are the most
well-known examples of this Austrian genre
outside Europe. Maria Lassnig, the founder of
Austria's school for film animation, and Sofia-
born performance artist Mara Mattuschka, a
former student of Lassnig, have created nota-
ble experimental live action and animation
films that feature Mattuschka as her 'star' alter
ego, Mimi Minus. A private non-profit organi-
zation, Sixpack Film, was founded by Brigitta
Burger-Utzer, Lisl Ponger, Peter Tscherkassky,
Martin Arnold and Austrian Film Museum
director Alexander Horwath in 1991, for the
purpose of packaging and marketing short and
experimental film for distribution at foreign
venues and in international film festivals.
With short films as the proven testing
ground for the new generation of Austrian
film-makers, undoubtedly many of the new
short film-makers of this current period will
surface as feature film-makers later in the
decade. Emerging from a typical creative arc
beginning with early Super 8 experimenta-
tion and the almost requisite study with leg-
endary Austrian film artist Peter Kubelka, to
sound/colour 16mm short films and promising
international attention is Thomas Draschan.
His seven-minute pastiche of brief excerpts
from international kitsch films and television
programmes of the 1960s and 1970s edited
into a 'narrative', Encounter in Space (2003), at
once imitates and lampoons traditional cin-
ema structures. Like Gustav Deutsch, whose
acclaimed Film is. (Film ist.) (1998) and Film is.
7-12 (Film ist. 7-12) (2002) offer pastiches of
cinematic motifs assembled from clippings of
silent film, Draschan sutures found cinematic
'Unlike the directors of the
New German Cinema's
Autorenfilm during the
1970s and 1980s, who saw
themselves in the tradition
of the French cinema
d'auteurs in their all-
controlling combination of
writer, director and producer,
Austrian multitasking,
while also a rejection
of commercial cinema
conventions ,was driven by
poverty and necessity.'
conventions but without the explicit sugges-
tion of Deutsch's pseudo-documentary. With
its snippets from Hollywood B-movies, Japa-
nese and British sci-fi, Disney cartoons, Aus-
trian historical drama and European sex films,
Encounter in Space underscores the ideologies
of entertainment film and the expectations of
the pop-culture audience. The effect is evoca-
tive of the kaleidoscopic colour and vocabulary
of Anglo-American psychedelic cinema of the
mid to late 1960s, but the 'narrative' suggests
a postmodern sense of futility to the adven-
ture/spy/psychodrama formulas it emulates:
L WEcotmtcr
ii ';r)nc tells the story of a man and
his alter egos ...
He has to undertake several
adventures, fight his enernies, also alter egos
of his personality. A promising sexual act is
www.filmint.nu 135
Articles New Austrian Film

6. Articles New Austrian Film Below Outer Space
interrupted by eye surgery and the promise
of introducing the man to his real self. The
promise turns out to be false and the protago-
nist continues to search for sexual adven-
tures, which seem to be the only alternative.'
Virgil Widrich, whose Copy Shop garnered
an Oscar nomination for his surreal-comic
short on image reproduction gone mad,
also recycles westerns, action films, melo-
dramas and animation to parody of for-
mulaic narratives in his Fast Film (2003).
Like Ulrich Seidl (Dog Days) both Sabine
Derflinger and Ruth Mader rupture the facade
of an orderly or satisfying life in their fea-
ture debuts. Derflinger began with dramatic
shorts and then turned to documentary with
Achtung Staatsgrenze (Attention, State Frontier)
(1996), about illegal aliens and others await-
ing deportation in Austrian jails. She moved
into feature films with her breakthrough Step
on It (Vollyas) (2002), where behind the images
of beauty and relaxation at an Austrian winter
resort, an overworked and frustrated single
mother's unhappiness leads to self-destructive
alcoholism and one-night stands. Her young
daughter's love provides the only possibility of
salvation. Ruth Mader's feature Struggle (2003),
follows the lives of very different characters: a
Pole (Aleksandra Justa) who has moved to Aus-
tria to work in a turkey processing plant, as a
berry picker and as a cleaning woman, in order
to better provide for her young daughter, and a
wealthy, divorced Austrian who seeks diversion
'The Austrian New Wave,
when it finally took
shape, was not wholly
revolutionary, but based on
the critical re-visioning of
traditional Austrian genres:
non-nostalgic period pieces,
politicized Heimatfilm and
feminist social drama.'
from his unfulfilling life with sex and sado-
masochism. Ultimately, their lives are altered
when they meet in a swinger's club. Abandon-
ing a classical narrative for the sake of an 'anti-
dramatic' exploration of the dehumanization
and alienation of various work environments,
the intersecting stories also relate the colli-
sion of two classes and geopolitical worlds:
the woman represents the impoverished yet
hopeful eastern Europe; while the man embod-
ies a hollow consumerist and 'emotionally
bankrupted' West. Mader flatly dismisses the
Cannes critics who compared her film style
to Haneke, Seidl or a mix of both. Unlike their
male gaze, which is disturbingly voyeuristic
and often dialogue laden, Mader and the other
women of New Austrian Film such as Albert or
Hausner utilize a more neutral, distant cam-
era and leave much to the imagination. Since
36 1film international issue 3i

7. Articles New Austrian Film Below Hitchcockian: Jessica Hausner's Hotel
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 rapid and expedient
product orientation has 'ruined' actors for the
thoughtful, detailed work of motion pictures
(Greuling 2003). But the representation of
eastern Europe as an exploited woman and
the association of western European malaise
with recreational sex is not a gender-specific
interpretation. Michael Sturminger's feature-
film debut, The Whore's Son (Hurensohn) (2004),
based on the novel by Austrian author Gabriel
Loidolt, and co-written by Michael Glawogger,
visits similar territory and generates a com-
parable mood of resignation. Unlike Mader's
film, Sturminger's imagery is stylized and his
narrative is more traditionally structured. For
the most part, dialogue propels this story of
the 16-year-old son of an immigrant Yugosla-
vian family who discovers that his mother has
worked as a prostitute for the years they have
been in Vienna. Increasingly alienated from his
aunt and uncle who find solace in Catholicism
and the past, and from his peers who know
the truth, Ozren (Stanislav Lisnic) desperately
attempts to reconnect with his mother (Chul-
pan Khamatova). But he is left behind, as is
the rest of his family, by his mother's refusal
to abandon her successful self-exploitation in
capitalism. Ozren's crisis of idealism, love and
identity parallel Barbara Gr5ftner's apprehen-
sions about an economic imperialism that is
injurious to the emerging eastern Europe.
American critic Ed Halter believes there is
a specific New Austrian Film style and feel, at
least among female directors: 'quiet, cool, and
subjective [these films] achieve a detached,
contemplative air so rarely attempted by over-
compensating American cinema, communicat-
ing a bittersweet beauty through the simple
evocation of interior life' (Halter 2003). Jessica
Hausner has clearly moved into that stylized
direction with her second feature, Hotel (2004),
in which a young woman (Franziska Weisz)
working as a receptionist in a luxury mountain
resort hotel, stumbles upon the mysterious
circumstances of her predecessor's disappear-
ance. She is pulled into a maze of secrets and
false conclusions, until her own identity and
possible fate begins to replicate that of the
victim. Although referencing the crime thriller,
Hausner avoids formula and concentrates on
'Mader flatly dismisses
the Cannes critics who
compared her film style
to Haneke, Seidl or a mix
of both. Unlike their male
gaze, which is disturbingly
voyeuristic and often
dialogue laden, Mader and
the other women of New
Austrian Film such as Albert
or Hausner utilize a more
neutral, distant camera
and leave much to the
imagination.'
more Hitchcockian themes of perception, the
interpretation of reality and the fear of the
unknown. Unlike the almost documentary
feel of Lovely Rita, the anxiety and paranoia of
Hotel is aided by a more distant 'smooth and
noble' (Wobrazek 2004: 41) look, which enforces
the faqade of beauty, control and safety.
The new Heimatfjlm, with its interest in criti-
cal and alternative views of rural and moun-
tain life, revitalized a genre that had died of
formulaic and broad comedy exhaustion in the
1960s. It rejects the idyllic notions of coun-
try life and solutions found in Catholicism,
by locating problems of Austrian society and
recent history in the genre. Stefan Ruzowit-
zky's The Inheritors (Die Siebtelbauern, aka The
One-Seventh Farmers) (1998) is a perfect case in
point. Placing the action into the impoverish-
ment, political instability and national identity
www.filmint.nu 137

8. Articles New Austrian Film Below Struggle
trauma of the Austrian First Republic (1918-34),
Ruzowitzky neo-realistically underscores the
difficult life of the farm workers who inherit a
farm to the chagrin of the landed farmers who
behave with aristocratic privilege and capital-
ist manipulation to maintain their control. In
the English-language comedy-drama All the
Queen's Men (2001), he relates the fictionalized
story of four Allied soldiers disguised as women
who attempt to steal the German Enigma cod-
ing machine. Although the film brings to mind
the transvestite humour ofAustro -Hollywood
director Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot (USA,
1959) from which it borrows, Ruzowitzky deftly
uses the film to comment on Hollywood filmic
conventions and to question concepts of manli-
ness and heroism. This quirky film failed with
critics and on the international market because
of its odd miscasting, which attempted to
appeal to American and British audiences, and
a weak marketing structure, which was obvi-
ously unprepared to deal internationally with
a mainstream Austrian entertainment film.
Ruzowitzky revisits the era in a far grimmer
manner with The Counterfeiters (Die Fdlscher)
(2007), based on the true story of the largest
counterfeiting operation in history, set up by
the Nazis with concentration-camp inmates.
Such mainstream forays into the long taboo
subject of Austria and Nazism in the national
cinema owes its breakthrough to the late vet-
eran entertainment director Franz Antel, who
revitalized his career with a popular tragicomic
saga of four films (the final chapter completed
in 2003, when the director was aged 90) deal-
ing with Austria's place in central Europe as
seen through the eyes of a Viennese butcher
(Karl Merkatz) and his family,beginning with
the Anschluss in Der Bockerer (The Stubborn
Mule) (1981). Its critical and popular success
proved that the Nazi period in Austria could be
approached in commercial film. Antel cinemati-
cally anticipated the long-delayed national
discourse on Austria's role in Nazism follow-
ing the 1986 presidential election of former UN
Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. However,
rather than inspire a new phase of historical
drama in Austrian film, most film-makers chose
to examine the past through fascist metaphors
found in the petite-bourgeoisie and working-
class experience of contemporary Austria.
This focus increased with the later rise of J6rg
Haider and his anti-immigration platforms.
During the 1990s, a cinematic assault on
xenophobia arose from a multicultural Aus-
trian cinema that had expanded even beyond
the reborn central European identity. One of
the significant Austrian film-makers of the
final decade of the twentieth century is Tehe-
ran-born Houchang Allahyari, an Iranian who
studied psychiatry and neurology in Austria for
many years until he turned, self-taught, to a
film-making that focuses on the experiences of
the social outsider. I Love Vienna (1991) features
an Iranian cast and the final screen appearance
of Austria's 1960s beloved sex symbol turned
character actress, Marisa Mell. In an unusu-
ally optimistic film for the director, it looks at
race issues brought on by eastern European
and Middle Eastern emigration as seen through
the eyes of an Iranian teacher of German who,
fearing the political situation in Iran, attempts
to move his family to Vienna. Hbhenangst (Fear
of Heights) (1994) includes veteran Austro-
Hollywood character actor Leon Askin, in the
story of one man's urban alienation and the
subsequent repression in a village commu-
nity were he flees for safety and freedom. Born
in Absurdistan (Geboren in Absurdistan) (1999)
returned Allahyari to culture clash in a curi-
ously emotional, even utopian film about the
accidental mix-up of an Austrian and Turk-
ish baby in a Vienna hospital, and the sub-
sequent journey of the Austrian parents to
a small Turkish town to correct the error.
Austria's new cinema often finds its effec-
tiveness in a bitingly ironic writing style. Josef
Hader, whose script for the 1993 tragicomic
odd-couple/road trip film (in which he also
starred) India (Indien), directed by Paul Hara-
ther, revisited the long influence of Viennese
cabaret on Austrian comic films and became
a national box-office triumph. Hader's work
38 Ifilminternational issue 31

9. Articles New Austrian Film Below Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters / Die Fdilscher
as writer/actor for Wolfgang Murnberger's
Come Sweet Death (Komm, siisser Tod) (2000) and
Silentium (2004), both based on novels (once
a popular source for Austrian film, now a
rarity), results in contemporary crime thrill-
ers that levy a strong critique on the class,
religious and party political underpinnings
of the 'Alpine Republic'. Michael Glawogger's
fascination with class and social abuse also
leads his feature and documentary films.
Die Ameisenstrasse (Ant Street) (1995) bor-
rows from two genres, the folk play and the
social drama, but transforms the elements of
both into a claustrophobic Kafkaesque tale
with a strong sense of the surreal. Glawog-
ger's telling of the strange inhabitants of a
Viennese apartment house and their evic-
tion by the new property owner has been
compared to the work of David Cronenberg,
David Lynch and Luis Bufluel. His film Slum-
ming (2006), co-written with Barbara Albert,
underscores the heartlessness of class and
economic privilege in a relatively wealthy
country, through the abusive games played
by two yuppies on dejected bar habi-
tu6s in the seedier sections of Vienna.
Along with innovative film styles and pro-
duction modes has come a revitalized inter-
est in Austria's film history and its influence
abroad. The new user-friendly Film Archive
Austria has issued a series of studies on
various film-makers and genres, is active in
restoration and preservation, and has gained
popular acclaim for its retrospectives at the
restored Imperial Cinema in the centre of
the city, or during the summer on the open-
air screen adjacent to the Archive's complex
in Vienna's Augarten Park. On the sixty-fifth
anniversary of the Anschluss in March 2003,
the Film Archive offered a retrospective to aid
'The new Heimatfilm, with
its interest in critical and
alternative views of rural and
mountain life, revitalized
a genre that had died of
formulaic and broad comedy
exhaustion in the 1960s. It
rejects the idyllic notions of
country life and solutions
found in Catholicism
by locating problems of
Austrian society and recent
history in the genre.'
in Austria's more recent coming to terms with
its past. 'Kino vor dem KZ' ('Cinema before the
Concentration Camps') paid tribute to over fifty
actors, directors, producers, writers, and com-
posers that perished in the Holocaust. Among
them were many influential figures from Aus-
trian film of the 1920s and 1930s: Kurt Gerron,
Otto Walburg, Fritz Grfinbaum, Ida Jenbach,
Rudolf Meinert, Robert Dorsey, Paul Morgan,
Joachim Gottschalk, Alfred Deutsch-German,
Siegfried Lembach and Max Ehrlich. Similarly,
the international film library and presentations
of the Austrian Film Museum, which in 2002
found new vitality under film critic Alexander
Horwath, proved that the showcasing of even
obscure film figures have become newswor-
thy public events. The Museum's retrospective
on the groundbreaking work of Austrian-
American cinematographer, editor and film
www.flrnint.nu [39

10. Articles New Austrian Film
critic Sascha Hammid, who was instrumental
in the development of IMAX, brought to light
how Hammid assisted his wife, avant-garde
film-maker Maya Deren, in the creation of
her milestone experimental film, Meshes of
the Afternoon (USA, 1943). Martina Kudlacek's
In the Mirror of Maya Deren (2001) specifically
takes on the life and times of this pioneer
from a female lens. Austria's significant pres-
ence in Golden Age Hollywood i s recalled
by Georg Misch in Calling Hedy Lamarr (2004),
a film dealing with one of America's great
import stars, an elusive personality who hid
her intelligence, wit and, to some extent, her
origin and talent, for the sake of a fabricated
and generic exotic image. While Lamarr never
actually steps in front of the camera, one of
Adolf Hitler's private secretaries, Traudl Junge
is all that appears in Andr6 Heller and Othmar
Schmiderer's Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary (Im
toten Winkel, Hitler's Sekretdrin) (2001). Unforgiv-
ing of her own naivet6, she relates her experi-
ences in a minimalist film that dispels with
the subjective influences of supporting histori-
cal footage and concentrates solely on Junge's
'talking head'. The other side of the Nazi era is
explored by Mirjam Unger, whose feature Ter-
nitz, Tennessee (2000) displayed her pop-kitsch-
flavoured fascination with the once fanciful
European notion of escaping a small town for
a Hollywood-style happy ending in America.
In Vienna's Lost Daughters (2005) she follows the
stories of eight New York women who were
forced to flee Vienna in 1938 because of their
Jewish origins. Having begun her impressive
documentary run in 1983, Ruth Beckermann
has explored the Jewish experience in Austria
and offered prismatic visions of her own jour-
ney as woman and artist. Her latest film, Zorro's
Bar Mitzua (2006), follows four young Austri-
ans from various sociocultural backgrounds
as they prepare and celebrate this important
Jewish ritual. Utilizing no voice-over, Beck-
ermann's intimate and often ironic montage
allows the audience to reflect on the unself-
conscious expression of the subjects' Jewish
identities vis-a-vis a contemporary Austria
still wrestling with a haunted national past.
Current Austrian documentary film is a
hybrid that subverts the authority of the non-
narrative film and mainstreams the abstract
visions of edgy cinematic exploration. Reflect-
ing the metamorphosis of Austria's self-image,
its new interest in historical re-examination
and its geopolitical shifts, found footage, found
events and random imagery deconstruct pre-
conceived or static identity into a collage of
reference-less filmic vocabulary that ruptures
the idea of any central ideology other than
its own immediate imprint. Michael Glawog-
ger's epic documentary on the people who
live precariously in the slums of the world,
Megacities (1998), was re-edited, amplified
and re-scored as Life in the Loops: A Megaci-
ties RMX (2006) by Timo Novotny as possibly
the first commercial film remix in history.
Both versions disturb the viewer by simply
framing the ugliness of (sub-)banality with-
out an overriding ideological or moral point.
Although born in Austria, Hubert Sauper
finds an international cinematic vision work-
ing in France. His work as film writer and
director began in the fictional short format,
which garnered him the Max Ophiils Prize
for Blasi (1989), but he soon turned to reality-
based subjects, and has since become known
as one of Europe's most provocative docu-
mentary film-makers. His television film, On
the Road with Emil (1993) established Sauper
internationally, and his full-length documen-
taries, Kisangani Diary (1998) and Alone With
Our Stories (Seule Avec Nos Histoires) (2001) have
been awarded a total of twelve international
film prizes and have screened on television in
thirty countries. Kisangani Diary, which essays
the plight of the 80,000 starving and brutal-
ized Hutu refugees who fled to Zaire in 1997
following Tutsi reprisals in Rwanda, is unre-
lenting in its attempt to show the depths of
human misery and contemporary genocide,
as well as the ignorance and apathy of the
world in the face of such inhumanity. Although
well known throughout Europe and Asia,
the film has suffered from the same lack of
attention as its subject in the United States.
With the interview mosaic of Alone With Our
Stories, Sauper takes on domestic violence
across the sociocultural spectrum in France.
Sauper returned to Africa in Darwin's Night-
mare (2004), where he explores the conse-
quences of the introduction of the Nile Perch
into Lake Victoria in the 1960s. This large
predatory fish eventually eradicated most of
the lake's native species, but multiplied so
quickly that the area was transformed into an
immense fishing, filleting and transport cen-
40 1film international issue 31

11. Articles New Austrian Film Below Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Our Daily Bread
tre during the following decades. The result
has moved far beyond ecological damage
and provides a cautionary tale on globaliza-
tion - international politicians rationalize the
industry without interest in the human cost;
the Russians trade armaments to be used
in African civil wars for their fish cargo; an
AIDS epidemic rages as workers spend their
few earnings on women who flood the area
to work as prostitutes; homeless children
are exploited and abused by the industry;
and as tons of fish are flown daily to Europe,
unabated famine creates a black market for
decayed and discarded fish among the Tanza-
nian population. Shot mostly in undercover
situations over a period of six months, Sau-
per's film was presented with several major
awards including the special Europa Cinemas
Label Jury Award at the 2004 Venice Film Fes-
tival, but has found distribution difficult in
regions that feel attacked by the film's revela-
tions of exploitation, including the European
Union and the United States. Ober Wasser:
Menschen und Gelbe Kanister (Water) (2007) by
Udo Maurer, is another galvanizing look at
looming eco-catastrophe in the shortage of
water that makes daily life a struggle from
Africa to Eurasia. The Austrian critical docu-
mentary style finds its most hypnotic expres-
sion, however, in Our Daily Bread (Unser tdglich
Brot) (2005) by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, in which
the seemingly alien landscapes and horrific
beauty of automated food production floats
hypnotically by its viewers like silent out-
takes from Kubrick's 2001 (1968). Only here
the images offer no fictional-mystical epiph-
any but chastise us for the often overwhelm-
ing brutality of human technological progress.
Like Hubert Sauper's elastic national con-
nections, Michael Haneke is a German-born
film-maker who identifies himself as Austrian
and finds a European vision working in France.
'Austria's narratives about
social fragmentation and
the falling facades of
modernist tradition, as well
as its detached/visionary
documentary form, which
abandons the audience in
the unknown, have proven
particularly difficult for
American audiences and
critics to embrace because
they are too visceral, too close.'
As the most internationally recognizable of
all New Austrian Film auteurs, he has become
known for an almost clinical distance to the
collapse of modernist order. His work has
stimulated international cinema discourse on
the level not seen since that of the French New
Wave or of New German Cinema. His break-
through as a film-maker came with his very
first feature, Der siebte Continent (The Seventh
Continent) in 1989, which along with his two
later films, Benny's Video (1992) and 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 glacia-
tions' (Elsaesser with Wedel 1999: 129). Firmly
couched in the social drama tradition, which
he then deconstructs and subverts, Haneke
reveals the pain that lurks beneath the daily
life of the bourgeoisie and the horrors it may
spawn. His theoretical influence beyond
www.filrnint.nu 141

12. Articles New Austrian Film Below Haneke's La pianiste
Bresson is clear: the fragmentary, subjec-
tive concept of Viennese Impressionism, the
distancing effects of Brechtian theatre and
finally, the rejection of the false totality of
art which Walter Benjamin saw as a strong
contribution to the aesthetic/political aim of
fascism. Haneke also regards 'interesting' or
'beautiful' films to be a 'banality', the result
of the advertising aesthetic and a detriment
to the precision of images. His films have
less explicit violence than an average detec-
tive story, Haneke claims, but it is the con-
frontation with self-deception that makes
them seem more violent than other films
(Haneke 2000). Haneke's Funny Games (1997),
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 lakeside vaca-
tion home and are subsequently met by two
well-mannered but bored young men who
slowly begin to menace the family and ulti-
mately kill them, offers no safety net for the
audience. Unlike the closure or resolutions
found in traditional dominant cinema, no
order is restored, no reason is plumbed and
the viewer is left to contemplate the relation-
ship between the media and escalating social
violence. Funny Games spearheaded the wider
film festival interest in Austrian cinema dur-
ing the late 1990s, especially after it became
the first Austrian feature in competition at
Cannes since the 1960s. His most controver-
sial and critically acclaimed films would come
with the new century: meditations on multi-
cultural racism in Code Unknown (Code inconnu)
(2000), Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek's
psychosexual allegory of a fascistoid Austria,
The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin/La Pianiste)
(2001), the apocalyptic collapse of order in
Europe, The Time ofthe Wolf (Wolfzeit/Le Temps
du loup) (2003), and in his most recent Hidden
(Versteckt/CachU) (2005). In the latter film, the
orderly life of a bourgeois couple is suddenly
disturbed when they begin to receive video-
cassettes seemingly surveying the exterior of
their home. Soon they receive more intimate
tapes and disturbing drawings. As the husband
fears for the safety of his family, he suddenly
has to confront the secrets of his past, while
his wife struggles to come to terms with the
revelations, and their comfortable existence
disintegrates. It is a thriller with no solution
and no possible closure. The work is so delib-
erately ambiguous that it demonstrates what
Umberto Eco calls 'the provocation of Chance,
the Indeterminate, the Probable' (Cannon 1989:
31) in postmodernity. Modern film-making that
is 'still the exercise of a reason which tries to
reduce things to a discursive clarity' (Cannon
1989: 31-32) is presented in its glorious failure
in Cache. Its postmodern power seems to have
also subverted the limitations of the perhaps
too modernist view of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences in the United States,
which rejected the film as Austria's nomina-
tion for the Oscar's Best Foreign Film of 2005
because the dialogue is in French. Haneke
has remade Funny Games (2008), his provoca-
tive exercise on the reception of cinematic
violence in the English language, and shifts
the action from Austria to the United States
as an effort to reach an audience that has
become numb to violence because of its strong
aspect in mainstream cinema entertainment.
Still underfunded in comparison to other Aus-
trian arts and European national cinemas, this
'feel bad cinema' as the New York Times labels it
(Lim 2006), has nevertheless quietly influenced
a new generation of film-makers internation-
ally. Its own coming-to-terms with fascistic
impulses are applicable to so many repressive
social structures globally, while the particular
styles of this wave and its poverty origins in
the 1970s and 1980s have been the model for
independent film-makers in Europe and the
United States since the 1990s. The multivalent
deconstructive form and the dark attacks on
xenophobia and exploitation that hallmark New
Austrian Film have even seeped into recent
Hollywood/international star vehicles (Paul
421 film international issue 3i

13. Articles New Austrian Film Below (Left) Hidden/Cach6 (Right)Code Unknown
Haggis's Crash (2004) and Alejandro Gonzalez
Inarrituez's Babel (2006) are the most obvious
examples) while its Hollywood Academy ignores
the still too uncomfortable originals. Italian,
French, British and Scandinavian New Waves
provided post-war revitalizations of the camera
poised against moribund Hollywood-style stu-
dio film-making and social/sexual norms. The
New German Cinema, Spanish/Latin American
revitalization and aspects of eastern European
filmic re-visions of the last few decades are
all so nationally specific in their modes that
they generated international interest without
being a transferable source for content and
style. The current Hollywood desire to tap into
'important' European film has resulted in of
all things, a planned 2010 remake of the very
time-and-place-specific masterwork of Florian
Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
(Das Leben der Anderen) (Germany, 2006), to cater
to the very large subtitle-challenged English-
speaking audience. Haneke's re-vision is, at the
very least, under his direction and easily appli-
cable. Unlike these other New Waves, Austria's
narratives about social fragmentation and the
falling facades of modernist tradition, as well
as its detached/visionary documentary form,
which abandons the audience in the unknown,
have proven particularly difficult for American
audiences and critics to embrace because they
are too visceral, too close. The socio-political
and gender-role targets are for the most part
universal and can easily be translated into a
powerful attack on the American milieu. In
Austrian New Film there can be no hollow
reception allowing for viewer closure, no protec-
tive illusion of detached cinematic tourism in
the experience of the non-sterilized Other. o
Contributor details
Robert von Dassanowsky is Professor of
German and Film Studies at the Univer-
sity of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He
is the founding co-director of the Aus-
trian American Film Association, writes a
column for the European film magazine,
Celluloid, contributes to the International
Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers and is
an independent film producer. His lat-
est book, Austrian Cinema: A History (2005),
is the first English-language survey of
that nation's cinema art and industry.
References
Cannon, JoAnne (1989), Postmodern Ital-
ian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino,
Eco, Sciascia, Malerba, Madison, NJ: Fair-
leigh Dickinson University Press.
Dassanowsky, Robert von (2006), 'Aus-
tria's 1960s Film Trauma: Notes on
a Cinematic Phoenix', Undercurrent,
3, http://www.fipresci.org/undercur-
rent/issue 0306/dassanowsky_aus-
tria.htm. Accessed 15 October 2007.
Elsaesser, Thomas with Wedel,
Michael (1999), The BFI Compan-
ion to German Cinema, London: BFI.
-..
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---
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---
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........
Greuling, Matthias (2003), 'Der
Existenzkampf wird hdrter: Ruth
Mader', Celluloid, 2, pp. 10-13.
Halter, Ed (2003), iDas Experi-
menti, The Village Voice, 12-18 Novem-
ber, online: http://www.villagevoice.
www filmint.nu 143

14. Articles New Austrian Film
com/film/0346,halter,48566,20.html.
Accessed 12 November 2007.
Haneke, Michael (2000), '71 Fragments
of a Chronology of Chance', in Willy
Riemer (ed.), After Postmodernism: Aus-
trian Literature and Film in Transition,
Riverside, CA: Ariadne, pp. 171-72.
Lim, Dennis (2006), 'Austrian filmmak-
ers with a heart for darkness', The New
York Times, 27 November, http://www.
iht.com/articles/2006/11/27/news/aus-
film.php. Accessed 15 October 2007.
Peters, Michael A. (2001), Poststructuralism,
Marxism, and Neoliberalism: Between Theory and
Politics, Lanham, MD: Rowman &Littlefield.
Wobrazek, Sandra (2004), 'Grosse Erwartun-
gen: Jessica Hausner', Celluloid, 1,p.41.
2i.ek, Slavoj (2002), 'Passions of the Real, Pas-
sions of Semblance', in Welcome to the Desert
ofthe Real! Five Essays on September 11 and
Related Dates, London and New York: Verso.
--1
........... - -.............
.-.. .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .
Endnotes
1 Canada, which had a different cultural-
political genesis, is also a core multicultural
nation. Its art and film can often be compared
on this level to that ofVienna and Hollywood.
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 sig-
nificant increase in published studies.
The Filmarchiv Austria issues restored
film classics on DVD and well-produced
director, era and genre studies. Vienna's
Synema Society for Film and Media has a
more eclectic publication catalogue. Con-
temporary film is examined in Alexander
Horwath, Lisl Ponger and Gottfried Schlem-
mer (eds), Avantgardefilm Osterreich. 1950
his heute (Wien: Wespennest, 1995) and
Gottfried Schlemmer (ed.), Der neue Oster-
reichische Film (Wien: Wespennest, 1996).
Elisabeth Biittner 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 bsterreichischen Films von 1945
his zur Ge9enwart (Salzburg: Residenz, 1997)
and Das t6igliche Brennen: Eine Geschichte
des bsterreichischen Films uon den Anfdngen
his 1945 (Salzburg: Residenz, 2002). In the
English language, there is Willy Riemer
(ed.), After Postmodernism.: Austrian Literature
and Film in 7Yansition (Riverside, CA: Ari-
adne, 2000); Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger
(ed.), Literature, Film and the Culture Industry
in Contemporary Austria (New York: Peter
Lang, 2002); Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger
and Pamela S. Saur (eds.), Visions and Visio-
naries in Contemporary Austrian Literature
and Film (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); and
Robert von Dassanowsky, Austrian Cin-
ema: A History aefferson, NC and London:
McFarland, 2005). The Austrian Film Com-
mission publishes annual catalogues on
new releases in all genres and its online
site includes interviews with film-makers
and current news: http://www.afc.at.
3 Rudolf Ulrich's Osterreicher in Hollywood,
2nd edn. (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2004)
is a hefty and detailed compendium of
Austrian and Austro-Hungarian expatri-
ate and exiled talent in the Hollywood film
industry.Many of these actors, directors
and film artists were also active in Berlin,
Budapest, Prague, London and Paris prior
to or following their Hollywood years.
4 2i2ek uses the phenomenon of'cut-
ters' who mutilate themselves with razors
'in a radical attempt to (re)gain a hold
on reality', as an extreme example of
'the "postmodern" passion for the sem-
blance [ending] up in a violent return to
the passion of the Real' (2iýek 2002: 10).
5 'Mein Russland: Ein Filmdebut aus
5sterreich', Celluloid, 4 (2002), pp. 10-15.
6 For an analysis ofthe collapse of the
commercial cinema and the lack of a main-
stream avant-garde in Austrian film dur-
ing the 1960s see von Dassanowsky (2006).
7 Thomas Draschan, homepage
online: http://www.draschan.com.
44 1filminternational issue 31

15. COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
TITLE: A Wave Over Boundaries: New Austrian Film
SOURCE: Film Int 6 no1 2008
The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it
is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in
violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher:
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