Austria

Vrääth Öhner wrote:
Key West is located near the southern tip of Florida, not far from Key Largo. In contrast to Key Largo (John Huston, USA 1948), Key West has no need of gangsters to reveal this paradise on earth to be an illusion. Looking back from a distance of nearly 50 years, it is sufficient to reconnect those images which – each in itself – represented a longing view of this paradise: images of boat-like cars sailing down the highway, of bikini-clad girls on the beach, of surfers riding the waves. A moral lesson? Possibly.Read More »

Quote:
A housemaid is cleaning a studio. When she sees a sculpture of a nude woman in life-size, lying on a couch, she starts to compare this idealized body with her own. She takes off her clothes one by one, thus revealing her own naked body step by step, and she compares the various parts of her body with those of the statue. The master of the house enters the studio. When he sees his housemaid naked, he tells her to go into the next room, and then goes into that room himself.Read More »

THE MURDER MYSTERY 1987/92, 16 min
BLICKLUST 1992, 16 min
PARTY 1995, 17 min
MACUMBA 1995, 18 min
CORRIDOR 1997, 18 min
ORGANICS 1998/99, 17 min
BONUSTRACK: INTERVIEW MIT DIETMAR BREHM 2000, 8:30 min (TIV-TV station)

Even though the six films function perfectly well as individual works, I always had the feeling
of filming a single work. The source of inspiration was much of the historical Roman literature I read.
From this sprang the motivation for the sombre-sexual treatment of the pumping-screen body portrayals.
In the end we are all living corpses and very soon dead again
Dietmar BrehmRead More »

Quote:
Four nude girls prance about in a small clearing in a dense wood or green garden. Two stay coyly to the left, one dances in the front with a flowing, flimsy veil, and another, far right, mimics the dancer’s movements.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘New York City 1940. A ship arrives filled with exhausted refugees desperate to begin a new lives. Alfred “Freddy” Wolff, a young Austrian Jew, dreams of starting anew in the mythic American West, but instead struggles to overcome the piercing alienation of immigrant life. In Brooklyn, an émigré community tries to recreate their European café life in a local coffee shop, but nothing can disguise their feelings of loneliness and profound loss.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘In the conclusion of Axel Corti’s trilogy Freddy, a Viennese Jew who emigrated to New York after Hitler’s invasion, and Adler, a left-wing intellectual originally from Berlin, return to Austria in 1944 as soldiers in the U.S. Army. Freddy falls in love with the daughter of a Nazi, and Adler attempts to go over to the Communist Zone. But with the advent of the Cold War and continuing anti-semitism, the idealism of both characters is shattered as they find themselves surrounded by cynicism, opportunism, and universal self-deception.’
– National Center for Jewish FilmRead More »

Quote:
Vienna in the 1950´s. A childhood captured on 8mm film, documented by 13-year-old Johanna. A childhood as it might have been. We see fragments of family life and family secrets, an apartment regularly visited by women, centered around grandmother Maria Steinwendner who holds weekly cooking clubs in her kitchen. But somehow, the women never actually seem to do any cooking.
“Papa always said you have to be quick if you want to see anything. Because everything vanishes so quickly”, Johanna says to herself as she films the dead body of a cat on the pavement. “But I don´t think that´s true. I think you just have to keep looking”. And Johanna keeps looking. Until the camera´s gaze suddenly turns on herself. (production note)Read More »

Quote:
ELFRIEDE JELINEK: “Language Unleashed” Child prodigy, scandal writer, traitor of the fatherland, theatre fury, feminist, model lover, communist, pessimist, language terrorist, rebel, enfant terrible, defiler of the nest, brilliant, vulnerable artist, Nobel Prize winner.Read More »

this is a recording of Claus Peymann’s original and legendary staging of Thomas Bernhard’s most political play that broke with the austrian myth that austria
was supposedly the first victim of the nazis and caused quite an uproar among (mostly the conservative parts of the) austrian public.Read More »