Austria

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Das Notizbuch des Mr Pim is structured around competing and contradictory narratives. While notes taken during an interview with a right-wing journalist – a convenient device in a silent film – tell of economic and cultural decline, of the very great damage that the empowerment of the workers has done to ‘das schone alte Wien’ [beautiful old Vienna], this account and its nostalgia for ‘das goldene Wienerherz’ [the golden heart of Vienna] are repeatedly juxtaposed with images of capitalist exploitation, militarism, extreme poverty and grim living conditions in the pre-1918 period. The charges against the Socialist administration are then refuted, almost point by point, as Phyllis and her fiance show their visitor (who, like that other American archetype, Homer Simpson, hails from Springfield, USA!) around the new Vienna, notably taking him to Karl-Marx-Hof in order to disprove the claim that the showpiece of the municipal housebuilding programme is already in need of repair…….Read More »

Synopsis
The Austrian expressionist poet Georg Trakl was in love with his sister. And she loved him back. Their relationship became sexual and caused quite a stir in the local society. But when his sister asked him to flee with her to Australia where no one knew them and they could live as husband and wife, he refuse for he could not live without the beauty of the German language. Torn between his love for words and his love for Grete, Georg turned to drugs and entered a downward spiral.
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The story of the Viennese butcher Karl Bockerer from the moment the Nazis took power until their end. He and his family are no noble men, and they all don’t seem to be gifted with wisdom. But while the rest of his family follows the Fuehrer, Karl Bockerer refuses to get assimilated by the new system. With his aggressive but charming behavior but also with a whole lot of luck he survives through the years…Read More »

“An intense and unrelenting film with an excellent cast…” ~Cineuropa

Synopsis:
When Fuchs starts his new job as a teacher in a prison school, replacing the old and unconventional teacher Berger against her will, he is forced to confront his biggest fear, triggered by the mysterious, withdrawn inmate Samira.Read More »

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The simultaneously random and interconnected nature of modern existence comes into harrowing focus in the despairing final installment of Michael Haneke’s trilogy. Seventy-one intricate, puzzlelike scenes survey the routines of a handful of seemingly unrelated people—including an undocumented Romanian boy living on the streets of Vienna, a couple who are desperate to adopt a child, and a college student on the edge—whose stories collide in a devastating encounter at a bank. The omnipresent drone of television news broadcasts in 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance underscores Haneke’s vision of a numb, dehumanizing world in which emotional estrangement can be punctured only by the shock of sudden violence.Read More »

A world-famous pianist loses both hands in an accident. When new hands are grafted on, he doesn’t know they once belonged to a murderer.Read More »

Thomas Bernhard’s “Die Jagdgesellschaft”
Directed by Claus Peymann
Recorded in 1974 at Burgtheater Vienna

The bark-beetle has invaded the big forest of the general, just as a fatal illness has into the body of its owner. The general is suffering from eye cataract, preventing him from seeing the symptoms of the trees’ decline, just as he is unable to see his own rottening. His wife and the writer discuss these circumstances for two scenes, until the general discovers the fact himself in the third one. Now he is going to take appropriate action.
“The actors this evening were of peerless mastery. It’s impossible to imagine a better realization of this piece!” Frankfurter Allgemeine NewspaperRead More »

Quote:
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 »

Documentary which take as subject the Oberhausen Group and New German Cinema, and some of those who followed in their footsteps.
It contains a glimpse of a very young Werner Herzog, here predicting the rise of home video long before the technology entered the mainstream.
With Rob Houwer, Hans Rolf Strobel, Peter Schamoni, Norbert Kückelmann, Alexander Kluge, Marran Gosov, Werner Herzog, Edgar Reitz, Hans Toussaint, Hans Pflüger, Fred Hoffmann, Edgar Reitz – Produced by: WDS-Film for ORFRead More »