Austrian Film to 2000

By Robert von Dassanowsky [1]

The re-emergence of Austrian film on the screens of international film festivals, art houses, cable networks, DVDs, and in the consciousness of film critics and historians worldwide since the turn of the century is hardly the sudden or belated flowering of a national cinema some would have it be. It is the cyclical revitalization of geographically framed film art experiences.

Der Weisse Traum [2] (1943)

What makes this one so different - to the point of both national and international memory lapse - has far more to do with the no fewer than five political incarnations of Austria in the 20th century and a long and nearly fatal lack of government interest and subsidy in the postwar era. The collapse of a commercial film industry for a decade or more, as in the case of Austria's nadir during the 1960s and 70s, can quickly foster amnesia at home and abroad. Nevertheless, the significant contribution of Austria to cinematic art cannot help but surface with interest in New Austrian Film.

Beginnings and the Silent Era

The sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire with its multinational and multicultural nature led to the overlapping of early Austrian film with that of Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian and other Central European national cinemas. During the silent era, language was not a criterion and one cannot only consider Austrian those films made within the territory of German-speaking Austria. Traditionally, Count Alexander von Kolowrat-Krakowsky [3] has been labeled the father of the Austrian film industry, but with due respect to Sascha Kolowrat (as he was professionally known) and Heinz Hanus [4]'s missing or unfinished 1908 Von Stufe zu Stufe [5] (From Step to Step), the first Austrians to actually produce feature films were the team of Louise Veltée-Kolm [6], her husband, photographer Anton Kolm [7] and their cameraman Jakob Julius Fleck [8]. In the late 1990s, early Austrian erotic films were rediscovered that predate the Veltée-Kolm productions, but it was their efforts, beginning in 1906, that mark the mainstream beginning of an Austrian film industry.

Contrary to popular culture clichés of Vienna as the setting for operetta fare, its silent film tended towards socially critical melodrama, and the efforts of one of the world's female cinema pioneers, Louise Kolm (later Louise Fleck) provided a more naturalistic and literary-based alternative to Hollywood comedies, German Expressionism [9] and to Italy's Roman extravaganzas. Although other production companies were founded, the Kolm-Fleck and Kolowrat companies dominated Austrian industry until the eve of the First World War, which transformed their competition. While the Kolm-Fleck studio specialized in patriotic melodramas such as Mit Herz und Hand fürs Vaterland [10] (With Heart and Hand for the Fatherland, 1915), with war songs by operetta composer Franz Lehár [11] and featuring Austria's first film star, Liane Haid [12], Kolowrat concentrated on war reportage. By 1916, he held a monopoly in newsreel creation with his Sascha-Kriegswochenbericht (Sascha Weekly War Report). Often sweetening these documentaries with studio effects and fictional scenes, the power of such sensationalized images taught Kolowrat a lesson regarding the medium's attraction and also gave him a recipe for its exploitation.

After the founding of the First Austrian Republic in 1919 and through the 1920s, both the Kolm-Fleck and the Kolowrat studios attempted lavish biopics and translated operas for the screen. Sascha Kolowrat had long admired American films and their easy exportability, and his intention to create an Austrian cinema international in theme and groundbreaking in presentation was something that he had planned throughout the war years. Between 1920 and 1925, Kolowrat would attempt to fulfill that desire. It would shape his greatest phase as a producer and contribute impressively to the international development of silent film.

In a genre reminiscent of both the American biblical film and the Italian historical epic, Kolowrat's new work combined the monumental silent and the Viennese social drama to create an entirely new Austrian national cinema style. It was as if the lost Empire and its role as a leading world power would now be continued in the expanse and grandeur of the Republic's cinematic illusions. He employed two Austro-Hungarian directors, Mihály Kertész (later Hollywood's Michael Curtiz [13]) and Alexander Korda [14] to create Sodom und Gomorrah [15] (1922) and Samson und Delila [16] (1922), respectively. These films not only demanded a sizeable number of actors, they also required a small army behind the cameras. Unlike the select practices of the wealthy Hollywood industry, the employment of so many people in a monumental silent film shot in Vienna was made feasible by the high rates of inflation and unemployment in the First Republic. Kolowrat gave craftspeople work as set builders, technicians, carpenters, metalworkers, prop creators and pyrotechnicians. He built workshops that employed hundreds of women and men for the creation of costumes, wigs, beards, sandals, jewelry, flags and banners. Thousands of the unemployed and their children were paid daily for their work on a film.

Kolowrat also managed to utilize much of Vienna's available film crew talent as cameramen, hair stylists, make-up artists, tailors, wardrobe personnel and their assistants. Die Sklavenkönigin [17] (1923) directed by Kertész and known in English as Moon of Israel, rivaled Cecil B. DeMille [18]'s similarly themed The Ten Commandments [19] (1923) and outdid its special effects. A host of new European actors moved into star careers through these epic films including Anny Ondra [20], Lucy Doraine [21] and Maria Corda [22].

Despite the global popularity of the German Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari [23] (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920), Expressionism never took root in Austrian film and only two works stand out as an attempt to bring "Caligarism" to Vienna: an obvious reworking of the original in Das Haus des Dr. Gaudeamus [24] (The House of Dr. Gaudeamus, 1921), which also utilized other stylistic elements such as Jugendstil and Italian Futurism in its heady mixture, and Robert Wiene [25]'s Orlacs Hände [26] (The Hands of Orlac, 1925) with his Caligari star, German actor Conrad Veidt [27].

Despite the monumental films, technological rather than stylistic experimentation was of greater interest to most Austrian filmmakers at this point. Beginning in 1921, attempts at color films by "Hnatek und Leyde" were shown in Vienna. Emil Leyde [28], who had directed war propaganda drama, offered tri-color (blue/green/red) films such as Fatmes Erretung [29] (Fatme's Rescue, 1922), written and directed by Hanns Marschall [30], and Fiat Lux [31] (1923), directed by Wilhelm Thiele [32].

Biographical dramas on figures from Austria's long imperial history also provided satisfying entertainment for a new republic attempting to define its national identity. The most popular era by far was the post-Napoleonic Biedermeier [33] (1815 - 1848), which offered escapism from the economic crisis with its images of a stable and orderly Old Austria and its impressive mix of 19th century heroes, legends and myths: Der Graf von Cagliostro [34] (The Count of Cagliostro, 1920), Beethoven [35] (1927), Ein Walzer von Strauss [36] (A Waltz by Strauss, 1925) and Vater Radetzky [37] (Father Radetzky, 1929). The epic film trend was cut short by Kolowrat's early death in 1927, but both socially critical melodrama and lavish period films continued into the 1930s.

Among the former was director Gustav Ucicky [38]'s look at doomed love and the petty underworld in Café Elektric [39] (1927). It stars two extraordinary Kolowrat discoveries: Willi Forst [40] as the small-time gigolo and Marlene Dietrich [41] as the dance hall girl. The already dapper Willi Forst would become one of the great romantic leads in German-language film and Austria's greatest film director during the 1930s and 40s, while Dietrich shows signs of the seductive physicality that was to make her an international sensation in Austrian director Josef von Sternberg [42]'s Der blaue Engel [43] (The Blue Angel [44], 1930).

The Viennese Film and the Emigrantenfilm

The development of sound film in Austria was met by two opposing forces: a moderate upswing in Austrian film production and the sudden world economic crisis led by the American stock market crash of 1929. The first German-language sound film experiments were previewed in Vienna as early as 1928. That same year, director Hans Otto Löwenstein [45] premiered his Ottoton format, a synchronized phonograph recording system he named after himself, with his short film, G'schichten aus der Steiermark [46] (Stories from Styria), which he made in four days. Its success encouraged Löwenstein to expand the film into a feature-length sound production, which was premiered in September 1929.

By that time, the Americans had won the international race to create "talkies" with synchronized phonograph sound. An Austrian brand of sound to film transfer, the Selenophon system, had been in development since the mid-1920s. It was on its way to international utilization alongside the American Western Electric and the German Tobis-Klangfilm processes when the 1938 German Anschluss ended Austria's sound system presence in international cinema.

Although Vienna could boast the cutting-edge technological wonder of its Rosenhügel studio complex, which had been created in various phases during the 1920s by Louise and Jakob Fleck [47] (who also departed for Berlin where they made Vienna-located film romances, melodramas and comedies so popular with German audiences), sound features arrived slowly, but made possible the creation of a genre that became synonymous with Austrian cinema globally during the era - the "Viennese Film."

Willi Forst [48] and Billy Wilder [49] in Vienna, 1957

The artist responsible more than any other for this concept was Willi Forst [50]. In the earliest days of the sound era, he had become known for his distinctive voice and "charming Viennese" persona in German films usually directed by Geza von Bolvary [51]. Forst actively developed his reputation as a great screen lover, but his directorial debut in a romanticized biopic on composer Franz Schubert [52], Leise flehen meine Lieder [53] (The Unfinished Symphony) in 1933, brought to Austrian cinema one of its greatest filmmakers and influential industry figures, whose lack of presence in the international film canon of important directors is one more casualty of the scholarly negligence that has greeted Austrian cinema since the 1950s. Lieder was so popular throughout Europe that it was reshot in a 1934 British version (co-directed by Forst and Anthony Asquith [54]) for the English language market. The co-writer of the original was Walter Reisch [55], who later, exiled to Hollywood, would script Ninotchka [56] (1939) and Gaslight [57] (1944) and work with Austrian expatriate Billy Wilder [58].

These stylized melodramas set in imperial Vienna were underscored with classical music and noted for striking montage editing and highly symbolic mise-en-scene. They were influenced by the elegant Parisian-life films of French director René Clair [59] (but also point to the baroquely-ornamented ironies of Erich von Stroheim [60] and foreshadow Luchino Visconti [61]'s detailed operatic flair) and usually deal with the romances and sacrifices of historical or fictional artists. Forst's follow-up in this new genre, Maskerade [62] (Masquerade, 1934), secured his reputation as a significant director and gave him the international recognition he did not quite have as an actor. It made stars of character actor Hans Moser [63] and ingénue Paula Wessely [64], who would eventually be considered as the world's greatest cinema actress by Laurence Olivier [65]. She would reign as Austria's dramatic film diva through the 1950s and then as the doyenne of German-language theater until her death in 2000. The centerpiece of Maskerade is a meeting between Leopoldine (Wessely) and the society painter Heideneck (Adolf Wohlbrück [66]) at a lavish carnival ball. Its strikingly romantic-decadent, even erotic mood can be credited to the soft camera work of Franz Planer [67] and to the seductive music arranged and composed by Willi Schmidt-Gentner [68]. Maskerade received an award for best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival and ultimately proved to be so successful internationally that Hollywood "borrowed" the story for a new, but less welcomed version entitled Escapade [69] (1935).

[70] With Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933, the National Socialist regime began to infiltrate Austria's film industry in order to force it to conform to Nazi ideology and provoke the destabilization of the country for an eventual Nazi coup or invasion. Only eight films a year were allowed into Germany, which had been Austria's greatest export market. No Jewish or anti-Nazi talent was to be present in these films. An Austrian-Czechoslovakian co-production also made headlines that year: Ekstase: Symphonie der Liebe [71] (Ecstasy: Symphony of Love), directed by Gustav Machaty [72]. It might have been praised for its experimentally abstract film vocabulary and symbolic plot, but it was the nude scenes by the young Austrian actress Hedwig Kiesler, later Hollywood's Hedy Lamarr [73], that made it a sensation. Henry Miller [74] compared Machaty's film with the experimental literary work of D.H. Lawrence [75], and Machaty followed this cinematic provocation with one of the great visually stylized films of the era, Nocturno [76] (1934), which blends an elegant Art Deco sensibility and minimalism into startling compositions that have been inexplicably forgotten by film artists and theorists. No less controversial than Ekstase, its tale of a woman who finds sexual fulfillment and luxury far from the confines of her lower-class marriage and family dared to suggest that female sexual desire was repressed by a male-dominated society and that money can indeed triumph over love.

Since live orchestras were no longer needed to accompany films, they were overused on screen in the new genre of the musical. Austrian cinema once again managed to cultivate world-class talents, this time with vocalists borrowed from its formidable opera and operetta stages, cabarets and concert halls: Jarmila Novotna [77], Maria Jeritza [78], Joseph Schmidt [79], Adele Kern [80], Jan Kiepura [81] and Marta Eggerth [82] were among those who increased their fame as musical motion picture stars. Films such as Wilhelm Thiele's Grossfürstin Alexandra [83] (Crown Princess Alexandra, 1933) with music by Franz Lehár and featuring Maria Jeritza, Joseph Schmidt, Leo Slezak [84] and Paul Fejos [85]'s Frühlingsstimmen [86] (Voices of Spring, 1933) with music by operetta composer Oskar Straus [87], launched a second career for many singers and operetta composers.

Despite the popularity of these films, the other important Austrian genre, the socially critical melodrama, was not neglected in early sound production. The economic crisis and unemployment also found resonance in bittersweet comedies like Hans Steinhoff [88]'s Scampolo [89] (1932) with Dolly Haas [90] and Paul Hörbiger [91]. Billy Wilder wrote the script for the film and for the following Steinhoff comedy, Madame wünscht sich keine Kinder [92] (Madame Does Not Prefer Children, 1932), a vehicle for Austria's original movie star, Liane Haid [93]. Wilder's unique iconoclastic Hollywood style is already obvious in Scampolo, where his comedy dared to attack party politics, racism and political oppression with witty, double entendre-laden dialogue. Following these two films, Wilder, who had been born in imperial Austro-Poland and originally worked as a journalist in Vienna, moved to Berlin and ultimately to Hollywood.

Austria's industry essentially split in two after 1934: the mainstream "Aryanized" productions supported by Austrian Nazis that informed Germany of the racial quality of cast and crew, and the Emigrantenfilm, or emigrant film, which included German talent that had fled into Austria and those who were unacceptable to Germany or refused to bow to Nazi pressure. These films were mostly co-produced with Hungary or Czechoslovakia, but also with The Netherlands and Sweden, and were shot in several languages for distribution across Europe, with the exception of Germany. Even as the political Catholicism of the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg [94] era Austrofascism (1934 - 38) influenced cinematic trends, the Emigrantenfilm offered Hollywood-style musicals, class-conflict comedies and questioned archaic gender roles. It gave significant careers to Hans Jaray [95] and Hungarian-born Franziska Gaal [96], one of the important but forgotten comediennes in German-language film.

Also brought to wider fame were dancer Rosy Barsony [97], Hollywood-bound character actor Szöke Sakall [98] and rotund former UFA comedian Otto Wallburg [99], who fled to Holland after 1938, where he survived underground until his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944. From behind the camera there was director/actor Fritz Schulz [100]; director Max Neufeld [101], who had helped found the silent Kolm-Fleck Vita-Film company in 1919; and producer Joe Pasternak [102] who continued his work in Hollywood as producer of Henry (Kosterlitz) Koster [103]'s first Deanna Durbin film, Three Smart Girls [104] (1936), which saved Universal Pictures from grave financial crisis, and a number of MGM musicals.

Franziska Gaal's Peter [105] (1934), directed by Koster, was shot at the Hunnia Studios in Budapest and was her first of two successful romantic parings with Hans Jaray. The film's class-conscious tragicomedy is couched in the economic and social upheaval of the times. Franziska Gaal plays Eva, a poor young girl who is evicted with her father from their apartment for lack of rent payment and becomes a homeless street musician. Forced to exchange her clothes with a fleeing thief, she finds it easier to live as a boy named Peter. A confrontation with a doctor (Jaray) lands her before the youth authorities, but her impoverishment earns her the doctor's help, who finds Peter a job at a local garage.

Eva re-introduces herself to the doctor as Peter's sister and attempts to help his failing practice with disastrous results. An adventure at a dance hall involving a stolen necklace unmasks the role-playing and love, although the financial problems remain unresolved. Peter's poverty farce earned it the award for Best Comedy of the Year at the 1935 Moscow International Film Festival. It might be compared to the depression-era fables of Hollywood's Frank Capra [106], and with the witty, quick-fire language of the screwball comedy [107].

Peter certainly demonstrates aspects of this Hollywood genre, which thrived in Austrian film as well from the 1930s into the 1960s. Screwball comedy was essentially a hybrid creation, which continuously evolved between the aspects of American social comedy and the sensibilities of Austrian film-associated talents, such as Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch [108] and a host of expatriates and exiles who originally brought its cinematic impulses to Hollywood in the early 1930s. Its development is analogous to that of film noir [109], which transferred German Expressionism and sociopolitical pessimism to the American gangster and social realist genres, although unlike screwball comedy, noir never truly developed in German and Austrian film. Because these foreign artists spoke German and many had worked in Berlin during the era of expressionist film (even if this style had nothing to do with the artist's work), film noir is labeled a "German influence."

Paul Schrader [110]'s seminal 1972 article on the genre set this standard for subsequent research on the topic, but no one has bothered to question his conclusion that Hollywood was "bursting" with a "large number of Germans and Eastern Europeans working in film noir: Fritz Lang [111], Robert Siodmak [112], Billy Wilder, Franz Waxman [113], Otto Preminger [114], John Brahm [115], Anatole Litvak [116], Karl Freund [117], Max Ophuls [118], John Alton [119], Douglas Sirk [120], Fred Zinnemann [121], William Dieterle [122], Max Steiner [123], Edgar G. Ulmer [124], Curtis Bernhardt [125], Rudoph Maté [126]." Most of the foreign talent Schrader credits with creating the genre are obviously not "German or Eastern European," as he notes, but Austrian.

At any rate, Gaal's single mother role in Kleine Mutti [127] (Little Mother, 1935) was so popular abroad that Felix Joachimson recycled his script twice in Hollywood (as Felix Jackson [128]) - in 1939 for Garson Kanin [129]'s Bachelor Mother [130], with Ginger Rogers [131], and in 1956 as Norman Taurog [132]'s Bundle of Joy [133], with Debbie Reynolds [134].

Singende Jugend [135] (An Orphan Boy of Vienna), a 1936 Austrian/Dutch co-production directed by Max Neufeld may well have influenced the troubled-but-good orphan-boy theme in Hollywood films, such as Norman Taurog's Boys Town [136] (1938) and former Austro-Hungarian Michael Curtiz's Angels with Dirty Faces [137] (1938). Jugend begins neo-realistically with an orphaned boy, Toni (Martin Lojda), living in poverty with his street-musician friend (Hans Olden [138]). Toni dreams of joining the Vienna Boys Choir and his friend convinces the rector of the Choir's school (Ferdinand Maierhofer [139]) and a nun, Sister Maria (Julia Janssen [140]), to accept the boy. During a summer trip to the Tyrol with the Choir, Toni risks his life to defend Sister Maria, who has become his mother figure, from suspicion of theft. He recovers from his injuries to find himself welcomed into his new life and home. Despite its strong Catholic framing, it was both humanistic and pragmatic, and perhaps because of its statement on dignity and love, even in unsolvable poverty, it provided an antidote to the social-Darwinist German youth film and found major success with audiences in France, England and Czechoslovakia, where it was voted Best Foreign Film of 1936. Louise Kolm and her second husband, Jakob Fleck, returned from Berlin to work in this independent industry, which took on an anti-Nazi, pro-Austrian reputation.

Their third filming of Ludwig Anzengruber [141]'s play, Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld [142] (The Priest of Kirchfeld) in 1937 crystallizes the specifically rural-traditionalist, Catholic identity that was poised against Nazi pan-Germanism and promoted (along with monarchist nostalgia) by the authoritarian Austrian government.

A new film agreement between Germany and Austria in March 1936 stipulated that all German performers and crew (except the extras or atmosphere players) in Austrian film bound for German release would have to present their Ariernachweis, or documentation of "Aryan" status. Only 14 Austrian films would be allowed into Germany per year. The involvement of Universal Pictures in Austrian film after the studio's exile from Berlin led Vienna's film council, Eugen Lanske, to seek stronger American involvement in Austrian film production and to open the US market to the independent films.

Both MGM and Twentieth Century Fox promised solid investment in the Austrian film industry and planned on five Hollywood/Vienna co-productions in the foreseeable future as well as around 15 dubbing commissions per year. But German pressure forced Lanske to withdraw his plans. The opportunity to create Hollywood-Viennese co-production had been dashed. Given the significant Austrian talent in Hollywood, such a joint effort might have led to a unique chapter in international cinema art, which would have certainly influenced film after 1938 (as a true exile cinema?) and encouraged the return of Austro-Hollywood film talent to the postwar Viennese film industry.

The Anschluss

With the Austrian Anschluss to the German Reich in 1938, many Jewish and anti-Nazi performers and filmmakers had fled to other parts of Europe or Hollywood. Others were forbidden to work and were eventually arrested and interned in concentration camps. Propaganda Minister Goebbels foresaw a specific mission for Vienna as one of the three production centers (with Berlin and Prague) of the Reich. The newly consolidated Wien-Film company (Wien is German for Vienna) would employ the Viennese Film genre and produce operetta films and musicals as the more entertainment-oriented and more exportable aspect of the Reich's filmmaking, while UFA Berlin would focus on the dramas, historical spectacles, and on propaganda "documentaries."

Even the logo of the new company, a treble clef, blatantly associated Wien-Film with the mythos of musical Vienna. Viennese-associated traditions and images, even the dialect, was to be utilized as an indication of the Reich's Germanic cultural multivalence, to appeal to the audiences of allied and occupied lands, and most importantly, to cinematically annex the history and culture of Vienna (and by extension, Austria). But this co-opting of Vienna intended to contain and exploit, actually allowed Wien-Film to distance itself from, and to some extent subvert the dictates of the pan-German ideology.

Nevertheless, four films made by the studio were considered Tendenzfilme (overtly propagandistic), including the infamous drama Heimkehr [143] (Homecoming, 1941), directed by Gustav Ucicky [144] and starring Paula Wessely [145], which justified the attack on Poland by portraying Germans suffering at the hands of bestial Poles. There was a strict hierarchy among the actors and directors regarding assignments and studio promotion at Wien-Film and its semi-autonomous satellites. Willi Forst and Geza von Bolvary [146] helmed the musical and the Viennese Film; another actor-turned-director, Hans Thimig [147], created theater and literary-based features; and E.W. Emo [148] made comedies and two of Wien-Film's four political propaganda features.

Gustav Ucicky's specialty was a contrived form of social drama, which was not overtly propagandistic, but offered melodramatic allegories on the general values of the Reich. One of his most interesting films is the meditation on self-denial, self-sacrifice and the concept of a greater destiny in Mutterliebe [149] (Mother Love, 1939), written by his usual collaborator, Gerhard Menzel [149]. It was awarded the highest rating in Nazi cinema: "of particular political and artistic value."

Willi Forst's most important work of the period is known today as his Wien-Film trilogy: Operette [150] (Operetta, 1940), Wiener Blut [151] (Viennese Blood, 1942) and Wiener Mädeln [152] (Viennese Girls, begun in 1944 but not completed until 1949). While he certainly used the Reich to further his career, Forst was nonetheless aware of the distinct opportunity he had to continue specific Austrian content and style in such entertainment films while appearing to satisfy the official mission of Wien-Film. Operette has become Forst's best-known work. It is certainly a high point in the Viennese Film genre and brings together all of Forst's talents as auteur.

Returning to the place and time best suited for the Viennese Film, imperial Austria between the Congress of Vienna and the Belle époque, Forst's images are photographed with an eye towards 19th century court paintings by cinematographers Hans Schneeberger [152] and Sepp Ketterer [153], and are underscored by the music of Johann Strauss Jr. [153], Karl Millöcker [154] and Franz von Suppé [155]. Forst's script, written with Axel Eggebrecht [156], offers the backdrop of the historical Viennese theater world (with all Jewish personalities missing) at the end of the 19th century for the genre's typical theme of love sacrificed for art.

Forst gives an intelligently nuanced performance as the historical Franz Jauner, a provincial theater director who rises to the heights of Viennese society as its opera director, but falls when he is imprisoned for his responsibility in the catastrophic 1881 Vienna Ringtheater fire. His rival, the diva and director of the Theater an der Wien, Marie Geistinger (Maria Holst [157]), adores him, but has renounced love for a successful career in the more elevated world of opera, and she resists both Jauner's advances and his promotion of Viennese operetta. Although he successfully stages the new entertainment form, he is only forgiven and able to reclaim his place in society because a fatally ill Geistinger persuades the audience to welcome his "revolution of the operetta."

Following Geistinger's death, it is the naïve singer, Emmi (Dora Komar [158]) who earns Jauner's true love. But Geistinger, like Austria in the Reich, maintains a spectral, influential presence, and Jauner sees a vision of her face at the triumphant conclusion of the operetta. Although Operette suggests that artistic fulfillment and fame is available only to men, it is nevertheless unique in its portrayal of a 19th century woman who was as powerful behind the stage as she was on it. Such an image was hardly harmonious with the phallocratic dictates of National Socialist ideology.

Escapism was not always found in the past. Geza von Cziffra [159]'s sumptuous 1943 Der weisse Traum [160] (The White Dream) was intended to be Wien-Film's answer to the novelty ice skating musicals of Hollywood's Sonja Henie [161]. It proved to have lasting popularity even in the most censored of cultural atmospheres: prints obtained during occupation of Vienna, ran in Soviet cinemas throughout the postwar years. Attila Hörbiger [162]'s brother, Paul Hörbiger, became synonymous with a gentle, ironic comedic style and was often pared with curmudgeon-like Hans Moser [163] as Austria's comedy "Dream Team" that lasted into the late 1950s.

Studio chief and director Karl Hartl [164] attempted, without success in some cases, to keep the anti-Nazi sentiments of many of his stars hidden from the officials. He had been known to scoff at Nazi cultural doctrines and directed the 1942 Mozart [164] biography Wen die Götter lieben [165] (Whom the Gods Love), written by Eduard von Borsody [166], which was greeted as a German "genius film" (propagandistic celebration of German cultural superiority) but actually countered the tenets of that genre. Certainly, Mozart may be interpreted as a genius who rises from the people and falls to them again, but his transcendence is in his art rather than in a "heroic" life, and Hartl's film emphasizes this quite directly. Despite the posturing of the title, Hartl's Mozart appears as the unruly target of a regimented world that would have him appropriately submissive or disappear - much like Austrian cultural identity in the Nazi Reich.

Postwar Film Through the 1960s

The four-power division of Austria beginning in 1945 and not ending until the long-delayed return of full sovereignty in 1955, hurt the early return of Austria to the world film market. The former Wien-Film Rosenhügel studio was under Soviet administration, while other sites and production facilities were damaged or in the US, French or British zones. Nevertheless, film production resumed on a limited basis in 1946.

Although many production companies emerged, the first new studio to produce independently of Allied restrictions was Belvedere-Film (founded by producer August Diglas [167], director Emmerich Hanus [168], brother of silent pioneer Heinz Hanus, and opera singer Elfi von Dassanowsky [169]), which attempted to cleanse genres of its Nazi taint and discovered several major talents in its short five-year run, in particular, European leading lady Nadja Tiller [170] and film and television comic actor/writer/director Günther Philipp [171].

Although Attila Hörbiger, Paula Wessely [172] and Gustav Ucicky had tainted their reputations with Heimkehr, they eventually joined many of the directors and stars of the 30s and 40s who continued as major forces in the industry of the 1950s. Karl Hartl returned to direction and offered a family epic on recent Austrian history, Der Engel mit der Posaune [173] (The Angel with a Trumpet, 1948). The film was remarkable for its elegant style, its early attempt to deal with Nazism, and for uniting the pre-war generation of stars with new talent.

It was also the first postwar Austrian film to be presented at the Venice Film Festival. Alexander Korda, who had become a major British film producer during the war, convinced Hartl to create an English-language version in 1950, which brought stardom to Oskar Werner [173] and Maria Schell [173]. Hartl's dynastic melodrama of Central European family tradition, opportunism and disaster in National Socialism began a trend which continued with such international films as Vincente Minnelli [173]'s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse [174] (1962), Luchino Visconti [174]'s The Damned [174] (1970) and István Szabó [174]'s Sonnenschein [174] (Sunshine, 1999), among many others. Werner's turn at portraying Mozart [175] (1955) in Hartl's second biopic on the composer (this time in color) moved him quickly to Hollywood and international productions.

The son of Louise Kolm-Fleck, Walter Kolm-Veltée [176], made his directorial debut with the Beethoven [176] drama, Eroica [177] in 1949. The most expensive postwar film to that date, it presents Ewald Balser [178] as the composer supported by both the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Hans Knappertsbusch [179], as well as the Vienna State Opera chorus, the Vienna Boys Choir and several vocal and instrumental soloists. The film's story of Beethoven's rejection of Napoleon, of an avaricious nephew (Oskar Werner), and even of love for the sake of his art, follows Viennese Film form, and the more naturalistic rather than stylized performances, outstanding production values and technical excellence helped make it the greatest critical success in Austria's postwar era.

Its popularity, like the composer biopics before and after it, demonstrate that the cinematic rediscovery of Austrian culture, even identity, was to be found in readapting the same genre that held the forbidden identity in trust during the Reich - the Viennese Film. While Eroica truly reintroduced the high quality and unique style of Austrian cinema to the world for a brief time (the film was hailed at Cannes), it failed to encourage national funding for filmmaking at home.

Historical biopics helped reconstruct a cinematic national identity couched in the imperial and "high-art" past but realistic exploration of Nazism and the war was largely avoided with only a few exceptions such as Die letzte Brücke [180] (The Last Bridge, 1954) starring Maria Schell. An experimental state-supported all-star sci-fi fantasy/comedy/historical pageant about a futuristic Austria still under Allied control, 1. April 2000 [181] (April 1, 2000, 1952) failed as an event film aimed at the international market and as a plea for sovereignty, but it has become a cult film that obviously influenced the non-linear, episodic psychedelic film style of the mid-1960s.

The most important genre to emerge from the 1950s, which saw a "boom" in Austrian film production, was the Kaiserfilm or imperial epic, created simultaneously and in rivalry by veteran Ernst Marischka [182] and newcomer Franz Antel [182], who had made his mark with light audience pleasing comedies (several featuring Paul Hörbiger and Hans Moser) that exploited and reinvented popular film trends and would remain Austria's most prolific commercial directors into the 21st century. Along with the well-crafted biopics, these lavish color fantasies on 19th century royal and aristocratic Vienna brought Austrian film back onto world screens.

Sissi (1955)

Its finest representative was Marischka's Sissi [183] trilogy on the young lives of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth (Sissi), which was so successful that it typed Romy Schneider [183] as the graceful innocent (to rival Brigitte Bardot [183]'s nymphet typing) for European filmmakers and fans until she broke with both Vienna and later Hollywood, moving into French cinema in the hope of obtaining more serious roles. Critics are conflicted on the value of these nostalgic/escapist films and their attempts to delineate Austria's past and its culture away from Germany and its troubled postimperial era and to solidify a positive international "identity" for the film market and tourism, while battling the threat of television and Hollywood imports.

The high production quality, painstaking detail and sheer visual beauty of these films certainly gave the American bombast of wide-screen, stereophonic Technicolor musicals and all-star Biblical films (which also fought the onset of television and embedded the entertainment with conservative American sociocultural ideology aimed against communism) true competition at home and abroad. Much of the Western world also seemed to find refuge from the Cold War in royal romance during the 1950s (Princess Margaret, Grace Kelly [183], Empress Soraya of Iran), and the popularity of these exports proved that no one did majestic Europe on screen quite like Austria.

A neo-realist [183] cinema that was thought (and hoped) might bring Austrian film the sort of critical successes Italy enjoyed never materialized, although two films are notable for their interesting Austrian take on the gritty urban style, Harald Röbbling [184]'s Asphalt [185] (1951) and Kurt Steinwendner [186]'s Wienerinnen [187] (Viennese Girls, 1952). As the imperial epics devolved into musical comedies and the period costume film was replaced with a retread of traditional operettas, it was the Heimatfilm, or provincial film, which had been present in Austrian and German cinema since the silent era that came to attract the largest German-speaking audiences. These romance/dramas utilize the beauty of the alpine setting and the "purity" of its rural world to enforce a moralistic ideology.

In the postwar era, they were adapted to present allegories on reconstruction and gender-role shifts as in Der Hofrat Geiger [188] (State Councilor Geiger, 1947); economic and technological re-emergence as in Das Lied der Hohen Tauern [189] (The Song of Kaprun, 1955), a film that centers on the actual construction of a hydroelectric dam at Kaprun in the province of Salzburg; and escapism from Cold War reality in Echo der Berge [190] (Echo of the Mountains, known abroad as Der Förster vom Silberwald, or The Forester of the Silverwoods, 1954). An Agfacolor production directed by Alfons Stummer [191] with exquisite nature photography, Silberwald is a hybrid between a documentary on nature conservation and a feature romance drama. It attained such a high level of box office success and fan-based popularity in Austria and West Germany that it launched many sequels, imitations and subgenres until the original formula was diluted with the pop music revue, and was fatally transformed by the sex comedy in the 1960s.

With the emergence of television and the artistic powerhouse of Austria's national network, ORF, the passing of many of the stars and filmmakers of the 30s and 40s, the loss of an Austrian film style in large multinational co-productions, the lack of a national subsidy which all other Western European cinemas enjoyed, and with more opportunity in West Germany, Austria's commercial industry basically disappeared in the 1960s.

While experimental cinema was introduced by the Vienna Art-Club [192] by the late 1950s, no new wave arose to re-create the narrative cinema. Instead, Peter Kubelka [193], Ferry Radax [194], Kurt Kren [195], Günther Brus [196] and Peter Weibel [197] created isolated and highly abstract films based in Actionist performance art. These examples of shock art, which attacked traditional forms and bourgeois complacency, alienated established audiences who abandoned the cinemas and turned to television.

Towards New Visions: 1970s - 1990s

The 1970s marked a return of narrative films, although these were small, local productions rarely screened in the remaining cinemas or exported. Narratives that would influence the direction of early New Austrian Film are found in Toronto-born director John Cook [198]'s Langsamer Sommer [199] (Slow Summer, 1976) and his breakthrough work, Schwitzkasten [200] (Sweat Box, 1978), a realistic examination of the life of the working class. Cook's films followed a Godard [200]-like exploration of the urban neurosis and claustrophobia born of the demand for order and conformity in Austria's conservative society.

One of the leading figures of New German Cinema in the 1970s, Wim Wenders [200], began his mainstream career with the Austrian production of Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter [201] (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, 1971) which was co-scripted by Austrian author Peter Handke [201]. Austrian-born international actor Maximilian Schell [201] moved behind the camera in what became one of the first examples of this new phase in Austrian filmmaking that attained a measure of global attention. His Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald [202] (Tales from the Vienna Woods, 1979) with Birgit Doll [203], Hanno Pöschl [203] and Helmut Qualtinger [203] was based on the 1930 ödön von Horvath [204] play and scripted by Christopher Hampton [204].

Although the title suggests a Viennese Film or an imperial epic named after the Johann Strauss Jr. waltz, Schell's film examines the tattered social fabric of interwar Austria, which, as a small republic, is beset by political polarization and economic crisis, and locates its identity in imperial nostalgia or in a looming Nazism. The bleakness and the brutality of relationships, particularly the objectification and abuse of women makes Schell's film drama a universal statement on outmoded gender roles and relationships and on the roots of fascism in the reactionary values of the financially imperiled lower middle class. Another examination of the working class milieu was Wilhelm Pellert [205]'s Jesus von Ottakring [206] (Jesus of the Ottakring District, 1976). This modern passion play, which received critical acclaim in Austria, was also viewed by audiences as a welcome commercial direction for the new artistic narrative style.

Axel Corti [206]'s Der Fall Jägerstätter [207] (The Case of Jägerstätter, 1972), which was written by Hellmut Andics [207], explores the plight of Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to be drafted in the army of the Third Reich. Confronted with various representatives of the National Socialist state, the church, family and friends, he concludes that a Christian cannot be a National Socialist and he is imprisoned for his crime. Corti concludes the film by positing the choice of conscience versus duty in several contemporary interviews. The film was a rare first attempt at exploring Austria in the Reich, and questioned the still rather undisputed importance of order above individualism in post-1960s Austrian society. Corti followed this groundbreaking film with Totstellen [208] (Dead Places) in 1975, with the participation of Michael Sharang [209] and Xaver Schwarzenberger [209]. The realistic look at the economic and social constraints of a farmer's son as he attempts to make a life for his girlfriend and their unborn child, attacked the notion of an idyllic agrarian world found in the Heimatfilm.

Director Peter Patzak [210] aimed to establish a politically critical direction in the roots of New Austrian Film and was first popularly known as the creator of a hit detective television series, Kottan ermittelt [211] (Kottan Investigates, 1976 - 1984), which often satirized sociopolitical and cultural clichés. His 1979 Kassbach: Ein Portrait [212] (Kassbach: A Portrait), written by the director with Helmut Zenker [213] garnered him critical attention. Here, actor Walter Kohut [213] portrays Karl Kassbach, a petty bourgeois man who feels threatened by foreigners and deals with the issue in a violent manner. Kassbach's creation of an organization for "Peace, Security and Order" underscores what the director sees as the xenophobia of an urban underclass, victimized by consumerism and idealized cultural nostalgia.

Valie Export [214], who had not been an Actionist but had created her own experimental performance art style in the 1960s, emerged as one of the leaders of feminist filmmaking with a substantial mainstream following through her reinvention of the sci-fi/body snatching film as a metaphor for female oppression, Unsichtbare Gegner [215] (Invisible Adversaries, 1978), and with the psychological/political thriller on a female reporter's abusive relationships with two men, one a possible illegal arms dealer in Die Praxis der Liebe [216] (The Practice of Love, 1984).

Post-1970s filmmakers succeeded in attracting a younger generation whose parents had abandoned cinema during the decline of commercial product and in the period of marginalized experimentation. Unlike the directors of the New German Cinema's Autorenfilm during the 1970s and 80s, 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.

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 critical subject matter, and in local production indicated the path for Austrian filmmakers into the resurgence of national and international interest in the national product. The "new wave," when it finally arrived was not wholly revolutionary, but based in the critical revisioning of traditional Austrian genres: non-nostalgic period pieces, politicized Heimatfilm and feminist social drama.

With ORF becoming a major film financing source, and a national subsidy finally announced in 1980, more narrative films found limited commercial or television screenings. These were revisions of traditional Austrian genres, such as the Heimatfilm, which now became neorealistic in Xaver Schwarzenberger's television series Alpensaga [217] (Alpine Saga, 1976 - 1980), explored political corruption in Christian Berger [217]'s Raffl [218] (, 1984) and the Nazi past in Wolfram Paulus [219]'s Heidenlöcher [220] (, 1985).

Der Bockerer (1981)

Veteran Franz Antel [220] revitalized his career with a popular tragicomic saga of four films dealing with Austria's place in Central Europe as seen through the eyes of a Viennese butcher (Karl Merkatz [221]) and his family, beginning with the Anschluss in Der Bockerer [222] (The Stubborn Mule, 1981), which proved that the Nazi period in Austria was now approachable in commercial film. Antel had cinematically anticipated the long delayed national discourse on Austria's role in Nazism following the 1986 presidential election of former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim.

Although eventually found innocent of any direct involvement with war crimes, biographical omission regarding his service record in the Wehrmacht was a lingering taint, and he remained a pariah on the international political stage. What has become known as the "Waldheim Era" did not inspire new historical drama in Austrian film. Instead, the examination of the past through fascist metaphors found in the petit-bourgeoisie and the working class experience of contemporary Austria dominated the films of the 1980s and 90s.

The second work of the new decade that moved the Austrian film into some mainstream success with national audiences was Der Schüler Gerber [223] (The Student Gerber, 1980), directed by Wolfgang Glück [224], from a novel by Austrian author Friedrich Torberg [225]. Xaver Schwarzenberger, who was to launch his directorial career in 1983, served as Gerber's cinematographer and the period film featured the most widely known New Austrian Film actor of the 1990s, Gabriel Barylli [226], as a graduating student who is faced with unhappy love, a dying father and the sadistic tendencies of his mathematics professor. Gerber's story ends on a bleakly ironic note, as he despairingly commits suicide to escape certain failure, unaware that he has passed his exit examination.

Although the original novel is a criticism of the lingering academic traditions of the Old Order in the First Republic, the film treatment shifts the parable to an examination of the seeds of fascism. Gerber represents the return to "traditional" quality (linear narrative, studio-type production values) and topic (war, romance, family melodrama) in Austrian filmmaking that, along with such later commercial successes as Schwarzenberger's Donauwalzer [227] (Danube Waltz, 1984), are influenced by the mainstream family viewing style of ORF's television films.

The other style, influenced by John Cook's Schwitzkasten, Peter Patzak's Kassbach (1979) and the films of Franz Novotny [228], rejects the influence of television and finds inspiration for its fractured narrative in experimentalism, neorealism and Actionist documentary. By the 1990s, films by Valie Export, Paulus Manker [228], Wolfgang Murnberger [229], Christian Berger, Wolfram Paulus and Michael Haneke [229] would display a more mainstreamed version of this avant-gardism.

Glück's second Torberg feature adaptation, 38: Auch das war Wien [230] (38: Vienna Before the Fall, 1987), became the most successful work of his career and scored a triumph for the early phase of New Austrian Film. Set in the year of the Anschluss, the film takes on Austrofascism and Nazism as seen through the experiences of a popular actress (Sunnyi Melles [231]) and her fiance, a Jewish journalist (Tobias Engel [231]). The doomed relationship, which is smothered by the panicked atmosphere in Austria during the weeks prior to Hitler's entry, is a valiant attempt at broaching a difficult subject in an accessible cinematic manner, despite some Austrian critics labeling it as "anti-fascist kitsch." But national and international audience reception was positive and the film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar of 1987 and received the Austrian Film Prize.

One of contemporary Austria's most audience pleasing directors, Niki List [232], began his cinematic reign in 1982 with his first feature, Malaria [233] (1982), a social satire which explored the customers of the fictional but trendy Viennese "Café Malaria." His re-vision of the traditional Austrian society comedy earned wide critical and popular appreciation and the work received both the German Max Ophüls Prize in 1983 and the Austrian Film Prize in 1984. The continued lack of a professional atmosphere in Austrian film financing however, was evident with this film, as the difficult process of launching it was ultimately capped by press accusations regarding mismanagement and debt, although the film played well in Austria and abroad. Despite mixed critical reaction, his 1986 Müllers Büro [234] (Mueller's Office) was such a commercial draw that its actors, Christian Schmidt [235], Andreas Vitasek [236] and Barbara Rudnik [237], have been associated with their roles ever since. The film established an all-time Second Republic box-office record to that date.

This blend of film noir, musical comedy, and parody deals with a seedy detective and his best friend who search for a missing man at the behest of a mysterious woman. The job places them into a maze of increasingly nihilistic intrigues. Although played for camp, the audiences seemed to find List's send up of the detective and musical genres a refreshing change from the more serious works of New Austrian Film. Indeed, the work is almost completely constructed with references to Hollywood Golden Age film and the West German and Austrian pop-musicals of the 1950s and 60s.

Axel Corti's career as promising filmmaker was cut short by early death. The Paris-born director originally worked in Austrian radio and theater before moving to television in the 1960s. Corti favored period pieces and literary adaptations, and was influenced by Willi Forst's Viennese Film style and the social melodramas of the 1930s. His trilogy, Wohin und Zurück (Where To and Back, 1982 - 85) for ORF, which follows a Jewish emigrant who escapes the Anschluss, finds an incongruent life in New York, and returns to Austria in 1945 as a US soldier, brought Corti brief global acclaim. His notability also managed to put Austria back into popular international cinematic discourse for a short time, as different segments of Wohin und Zurück were screened in European theaters and on various American public television network affiliates. All three films are masterworks of character study and tragicomedy, dealing with recent historical themes usually avoided by the Austrian popular media.

The final entry in the trilogy, Welcome in Vienna [238] (1986), written by Georg Stefan Troller [238] from his own experiences, garnered the greatest attention as a theatrical release. Concluding the saga of Freddy Wolff, as portrayed by Gabriel Barylli, Corti offers a mosaic of impressions and occurrences, which evoke a sense of both detachment and belonging as Wolff deals with the American lack of comprehension regarding his plight and Austria's socioculture. Evoking aspects of the Austrian identity crisis in the 20th century, the film also presents a pessimistic commentary on the formation of the early Second Republic and its avoidance of the Nazi past.

By the 1990s, the notion of a multicultural Austrian cinema became a much wider concept than Central European identity. One of the significant Austrian filmmakers of the final decade of the 20th century is Teheran-born Houchang Allahyari [239], an Iranian who studied psychiatry and neurology in Austria for many years until he turned, self-taught, to a filmmaking that focuses on the experiences of the social outsider. I Love Vienna [240] (1991) features an Iranian cast and the final screen appearance of Austria's 1960's sex symbol, [241]Marisa Mell [242]. In an unusually optimistic film for the director, it looks at the xenophobia brought on by increased Eastern European and Middle Eastern emigration during the 1990s 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.

Höhenangst [243] (Fear of Heights) of 1994, includes veteran Hollywood character actor Leon Askin [244], who returned to Austria in the 1990s, in the story of one man's urban alienation and the subsequent repression in a village community were he flees for safety and freedom. Geboren in Absurdistan [245] (Born in Absurdistan, 1999) returned Allahyari to culture clashes in a film about the accidental mix-up of an Austrian and Turkish baby in a Vienna hospital and the subsequent journey of the Austrian parents to a small Turkish town to correct the error. Racism is explored from an almost taboo emotional aspect in this anxiety-ridden dramedy.

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 subverted clichés by locating problems of Austrian society and recent history in the milieu. Stefan Ruzowitzky [245]'s Die Siebtelbauern [245] (The Inheritors, aka The One-Seventh Farmers, 1998) is a perfect case in point. Setting the action against a backdrop of the impoverishment, political instability and national identity trauma of the Austrian First Republic, Ruzowitzky neo-realistically underscores the difficult life of the workers who inherit a farm to the chagrin of and against the unyielding traditions of the landed farmers who behave with aristocratic privilege and capitalist manipulation to maintain their control.

Another break-out director of the last decade of the 20th century is Michael Glawogger [245], whose first feature, Die Ameisenstrasse [246] (Street of Ants, 1995), borrows from two genres, the Austrian folk play and the social drama, but surrealistically transforms the elements of both into a claustrophobic Kafkaesque tale about the strange inhabitants of a Viennese apartment house. The overriding obsession of the characters is their relationship to time and death, which seem to turn the inhabitants inward, away from the threat of an outside interruption of their orderly existence, even to the point of avoiding their neighbors. The renovation of the apartment house into condominiums reduces them to paralysis, while the new owners scurry about like the ants of the title.

Perhaps meant as a parodic statement on the European Union which Austria joined that year, the film also suggests an allegory on the trauma of the Waldheim Era: like the building, lingering guilt is "covered over," while the inhabitants are unable to deal with the past or the future in the hollowness of their environment. Glawogger followed this with a 1998 documentary on the survival of members of the underclass in Bombay, Mexico City, Moscow and New York in Megacities [247].

Glawogger's earlier film partner, Ulrich Seidl [247], who served as casting director on Ameisenstrasse, became noted for his quirky documentaries beginning with Good News [247] (1990), which observes the lives of the foreign newspaper sellers in Vienna, and Tierische Liebe [247] (Animal Love, 1995), which focuses on the often bizarre relationships lonely or anti-social Austrians have with their pets. Rejected for television showing by ORF and by some cinemas as well, the provocative film created a sensation at European festival screenings.

Stockholm-born Harald Sicheritz [248], who came from television, is an exponent of the successful transfer of cabaret theater to feature film with his first hit, Muttertag [249] (Mother's Day, 1993). Borrowing from the social drama's focus on the problems of the family unit as symbol for sociopolitical discord, the film also returns to the Austrian screwball comedy with its rapid-fire wisecracking dialogue and the disintegration of order as the Neugebauer family's plans for a Mother's Day celebration go terribly awry.

It was one of the bona fide box office successes of 1993/94, along with Paul Harather [250]'s Indien [251] (India, 1993), a black comedy, odd-couple film featuring the scriptwriters Josef Hader [252] and Alfred Dorfer [253] as health inspectors who detest each other but are forced to travel together across Austria and eventually develop a friendship which strengthens them even through tragedy. Sicheritz returned to the family under duress theme in Hinterholz 8 [254] (1998), about a Viennese couple and their difficult attempt to save money in order to escape their cramped apartment for a rundown farmhouse.

Without doubt, the three most internationally significant Austrian filmmakers recognized for their stylistic impact at the end of the decade were Michael Haneke [254], Barbara Albert [254] and experimentalist Peter Tscherkassky [255]. Haneke, whose work has stimulated international cinema discourse on a level not seen since directors of the French New Wave [255] or of New German Cinema [256], offered early films on the experience of social isolation or on dysfunctional relationships in a style influenced by Robert Bresson [256]. His breakthrough as a filmmaker came with his very first feature, Der siebte Continent [256] (The Seventh Continent) in 1989, which, along with his two later films, Benny's Video [256] (1992) and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance [256] (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 are Austria's "emotional glaciations."

Firmly couched in psychology and the social drama tradition, which he then deconstructs and subverts, Haneke's revelations relate to the pain that lurks beneath the daily life of the bourgeoisie and the horrors it may spawn. His theoretical influence beyond Bresson is clear: the fragmentary, subjective concept of Viennese Impressionism, the distancing effects of Brechtian theater and, finally, the rejection of the false totality of art which Walter Benjamin [257] saw as a strong contribution to the aesthetic/political aim of fascism.

[257]

Funny Games [257] (1997)

Haneke also regards "interesting" or "beautiful" films to be a "banality," the result of the advertising aesthetic and a detriment to the precision of image. His films have less explicit violence than an average detective story, Haneke claims, but it is the confrontation with self-deception that makes them seem more violent than other films. Haneke's 1997 Funny Games [257] 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 vacation home and are subsequently met by two well-mannered but bored young men who slowly menace the family in increasingly violent ways offers no safety net for the audience.

Unlike the resolution of dominant cinema, no order is restored, no reason is plumbed, and the viewer is left to contemplate the relationship between the media and escalating social violence. Funny Games has been regarded as film that spearheaded the wider film festival interest in Austrian cinema during the late 1990s, especially after it became the first Austrian feature in competition at Cannes since the 1960s. His most controversial and critically acclaimed films would come with the new century.

Because of the continued problems in funding feature productions, Austria has continued to have an inordinately large share of filmmakers who specialize in the short experimental format. Peter Tscherkassky, who teaches filmmaking at the Academies of Applied Arts in Vienna and Linz, however, has had several decades of presence on the national and international experimental scene, continues to create strictly within his non-commercial genre and yet maintains celebrity status.

His career began in the late 1970s, not as an Actionist, but as the Super 8 documentarian of that performance art. Tscherkassky's found cinema has been among the most important influences in recent European experimental filmmaking, and has even returned the concept of manipulating fragmented narratives to American avant gardists, who have forgotten that the method had a brief run in the underground cinema of San Francisco and New York during the early 1960s. Tscherkassky's "Cinemascope Trilogy" takes on dominant cinema modes and audience expectations. The filmmaker goes one step further with Outer Space [258] (1999) by cutting and reprocessing a scene from a Hollywood horror flick until the material itself appears to be pursuing the actor, collapsing in on her, torturing her with a soundtrack gone haywire, and with the very nature of the damaged film itself.

Following Tscherkassky's lead is Martin Arnold [259], who was a student of psychology and history before turning to cinema in 1988. His experimental found-film shorts such as Pièce Touchée [260] (1989) have attracted wide attention, but it is his manipulation of scenes from a Judy Garland [260]/Mickey Rooney [260] film, Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy [261] (1998), which deconstructs the codes of Hollywood into a Freudian subtext that has become a cult classic in Europe and the US. Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky joined other major experimentalists, Gustav Deutsch [262], Hiebler/Ertl [263], Thomas Keip [264], Mara Mattuschka [265], Lisl Ponger [266] and Friedrich Rücker [267], in a joint project, Eine Geschichte der Bilder: Acht Found Footage Filme österreich [268] (A History of Images - Eight Found Footage Films from Austria) in 1996.

Nordrand (Northern Skirts, 1999)

Slidin' - Alles Bunt und Wunderbar [269] (Slidin' - Shrill, Bright World) was co-written and directed with former journalist-turned-screenwriter Reinhard Jud [270] and Michael Grimm [270]. The film is an intertwined trilogy focusing on the counterculture of the teenage world, which foreshadowed her breakthrough, Nordrand [271] (City Skirts, 1999), and dealt with a topic that most fascinates Albert, the loss of innocence. Written by Albert with cinematography by Christine Maier [271], Nordrand focuses on two women (Nina Proll [272] and Edita Malovcic [273]) whose lives attract other young people of different ethnic and sociocultural backgrounds: a Romanian immigrant, a Bosnian refugee and an Austrian who has just completed his military service. Seeking self-realization and emotional support, and concerned with bringing children into this world, they live in a housing project on Vienna's north side and flounder between memories of war in Yugoslavia, temporary jobs, and unwanted pregnancies until they finally drift apart. Albert sets inserts from television news, flashbacks, symbolic montages and spaces of impermanence (bars, discos, underground passages, shopping areas, streets) against long takes dealing with the characters' desire for stability 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 here, 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 movement across Central and Eastern Europe that has allowed Vienna to reassert itself as an influential cinema site by the turn of the century.

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Despite the global interest in New Austrian Film and the strong talent crossover with Golden Age Hollywood, older Austrian cinema is still a great rarity in English-subtitled DVD or video release. Significant films by major directors as Willi Forst [274], Geza von Bolvary [275], Eduard von Borsody [276], E.W. Emo [277], Louise Kolm-Fleck [278] and such actors as Attila [279] and Paul Hörbiger [280], Paula Wessely [281], Hans Moser [282], Hans Jaray [282], Franziska Gaal [283] and the rest of Austria's pre-1960s classic star constellations have never been made available either as dubbed or subtitled videos and are also (inexplicably) largely missing in German-language releases. In 2006, the Film Archive Austria [284] issued a set of 50 films from the 1960s through the 2000s from its holdings on DVD for the Austrian market. The lack of exportability is regrettable given the ardent curiosity of the international market. The English-speaking audience can, however, have a glimpse of Austrian classic era stars Paul Hörbiger, Hedwig Bleibtreu [284], Anni Rosar [284] and Siegfried Breuer [284] in Carol Reed [284]'s quasi-Austrian co-production of The Third Man [284] (1949), which is available on DVD. The list that follows includes films up to 2000.

Austrian Films
with English subtitles
available on DVD
(including the European zone):

[284]

Barbara Albert [284], Northern Skirts [285]
Karl Hartl [286], Whom the Gods Love [287]; Mozart [288] (available from Film Archive Austria)
Michael Haneke [288], Code Inconnu [288]
Gustav Machaty [288], Ecstasy [288]
Stefan Ruzowitzky [288], The Inheritors [288]
Gustav Ucicky [289], Café Elektric [290] (available from Film Archive Austria)

Not on DVD (with English subtitles):

Axel Corti [290], Welcome in Vienna [291]
Valie Export [292], Invisible Adversaries [293]; The Practice of Love [294]
Helmut Käutner [295], The Last Bridge [296]
Michael Kertesz [296], Sodom und Gomorrah [297]; Moon of Israel [298]
Ernst Marischka [299], Forever My Love [300] (adequate English-dubbed compilation edit of the Sissi film trilogy)
Max Neufeld [301], Orphan Boy of Vienna [302]
Experimental Shorts by Peter Tscherkassky [303] and Martin Arnold [304] (available through Sixpack Film [305]; see artist's websites)

Robert von Dassanowsky [306] is Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and an independent producer. His most recent book, Austrian Cinema: A History [307] (2005), is the first English language study of that nation's film art and industry.

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