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Peter Kubelka’s first film, “Mosaik im Vertrauen”, reuses images that the filmmaker did not shoot himself: the film is thus a found footage film that foreshadows films by Bruce Conner, Arthur Lipsett and others. The film partly contains newsreel material from a car race, and various scenes from feature films where meetings between people are in focus.Read More »
Producer Joe Pasternak was making “Deanna Durbin pictures” long before he’d discovered Durbin – and indeed, long before he’d left Hungary. Pasternak’s 1935 musical “Peter” stars Franciska Gaal as Eva, a 17-year-old gamine who ekes out a living as a street singer. While wandering past an open courtyard, Eva confronts a young burglar, who orders her to change clothes with him so he can make a quick getaway. With nothing but her newfound male garb to her name, our heroine poses as a boy named Peter so that she can obtain a job selling newspapers. In this guise, she experiences all manner of hilarious misadventures, and even finds true love in the form of a handsome doctor (Hans Jaray). Peter was directed by Herman Kosterlitz, who as Henry Koster would later helm several of Joe Pasternak’s Hollywood musicals. (Hal Erickson, Rovi)Read More »
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Successful actress returns to her family home in rural Austria to visit her ailing father and her sister who spent her whole life taking care of him and her family. The reunion is marked by jealousy, introspection and a secret.Read More »
Trip from Vienna to China, the hazmat suits on the aeroplane and the layers of tape sealing off each room in the quarantine hotel conjure up images of crime scenes or medical thrillers.Read More »
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 »