Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

A look at sign language and the deaf persons who use it to communicate

Through archival film footage, animation and spoken word poetry an experience of structural violence against women is exposed.

Libi (1968), whose title is perhaps a punning conflation of “love” (“liebe” in German) and “libido,” begins with an onscreen title: “DIESER FILM ZEIGT WIE DAS LEBEN EBEN SO IST” (“This film shows how life actually is”). We are treated to a blowjob, an umbrella indiscreetly protruding from a man’s ass as he reads the newspaper, anonymous people contorting their asses before each other, and scenes of priests performing sacraments whose moldering ritualism stands in contrast to Müehl’s liberated sexual display. A sign reading “Direct Art” is then pulled away to reveal a close-up penis lurking beneath.

The heavy metal detox becomes an aesthetic paraphrase on the removal of dental fillings in the latest film by Austrian artist and filmmaker Josef Dabernig.

This film has two parts. In the first part, the film material is on 8mm uncut film, so that in the 16mm projection a 4-fold film can be seen. In the second part of the film, the 16mm film is shown in full size, that means the picture is now enlarged four times its size. I drew over the film after the fact, and abstracted it in many different ways. (E.S.jr.)

In this film the goal of destroying film semantics has been consistently followed though. Part of the film is composed of a seemingly collision of picture and sound. Whilst filming, the colors called out in the sound were really filmed. Because of the "mistakes" made (unfocusing, copying process, color temperature) the colors in the final printing were wrong. The audience is then confronted with these discrepancies. (E.S.jr.)

A documentary about dog therapists in a Zurich nursing home.

A socially critical melodrama about overcoming loneliness! It's never too late to give one's life meaning. A lonely elderly woman, Anna Korrer, lives a secluded life in her apartment and hasn't dared to leave her front door since her husband's death. When art historian Erwin Kronberger comes to town for an internship at Dr. Eberhard's gallery and moves into the apartment next door for a few weeks, his presence slowly begins to change her life. Forty-year-old gallery owner Eleonore Eberhard is constantly working, with an upcoming exhibition opening just around the corner, neglecting her husband and son. Mayor Franz Leitner is devoted to his job and has only the well-being of the town and its residents in mind.

'Europe, the Dream' is a documentary about three adolescents who are/were living in Patras, Greece: Andreas, a young Greek, Ali Reza, a refugee from Afghanistan and Abdulla, a refugee from Syria; they are each dreaming of a great journey to Europe, and, with all their hopes and fears, they are struggling to make this happen as they see it as the only solution for their lives. They don't consider Greece as Europe! The two refugees have in fact managed to reach their destinations: Ali Reza in Sweden and Abdulla in Austria. Andreas is still in Greece. He wants to study and work but his family has day to day problems which have been heightened by the Greek financial crisis. Will these three young men be able to realize their dreams or these dreams will be thwarted by the difficulties and complexities that exist in today's Europe.

In an associative montage statues of saints in rigid and rapt poses are cross cut with those of real actors until the two can no longer be told apart. Gradually the real bodies break away from the constraints of their wooden models through increasingly improvised dance. A successful act of liberation from (Catholic) convention, which the material celebrates in an acstasy of multiple exposures and psychedelic colors.

The tone is lyrical, the voices are real, the bodies are sketchy: A couple talks at the phone and in bed (a casanova and his victim). "You helped me, you made me strong, but you can't blame me for anything. When somebody loves so blindly, they pay with their life."

notdef., that could mean not deaf or, who knows, not defined. The monotonous thump of a percussively contoured, slightly delayed techno bass line underlies the images which, abstract and mutating constantly defy quick definition. In notdef./version one, virtual objects vigorously grow across a plane and into space from the center of the image for slightly longer than three minutes; nervously assembling and then falling away from one another, they overlap in glaringly bright colors before sinking back into the black matrix.

Santora is a metrically buildt cord of images based on the number 3 and the music of Fennesz. The video explores combinations of geometrical formes, building up corresponding sounds. Consious of their roots in historic avantgarde animation, but the same time drawing in structural cinema, the two filmmakers compose a "picture" which evolves from rectangels that appear on and disappear from the blank screen. White background, dark "windows", in which a figure seen from above passes through at various speeds. His diagonal passage, doubled and inverted, becomes another element of geometry and rhythm. The image, taken from an old film, evokes those of closed-circuit surveillance cameras by its impersonal repetitiveness. The sound obsessivily paces the variation in form on the screen.

A self-built screen amid an expansive green landscape. On it dance silhouettes of the surrounding trees and bushes. A natural cinema – without a darkened cinema hall, without artificial light and without film. From various camera positions, Viktoria Schmid portrays her screen, installed in the sculpture park of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, as a moving image within a moving image.

A doctor conducts terrible experiments in an all girls boot camp.

How do you know that someone is a ghost? You can't see his legs.

The film is based on the eponymous 1960 novel by author Peter Weiss. In this autobiographical text, the author describes the years of his childhood and youth in Germany in the 20s and 30s as well as the flight of his half-Jewish family from persecution by the Nazis. This odyssey also portrays the young first-person narrator’s struggle for his artistic existence, as he was striving to establish himself as a painter and writer. In a free, sensual essay between fiction and document, realistic description and stylised invention, the film attempts to kindle today’s flame based on the past’s, and to create a new and vibrant third work from it. (Locarno Festival)

Every summer, when the major football teams fly their star athletes to training grounds in expensive and sunny locations, some other players meet on a football field in Duisburg. Even though there are professional footballers, they are all unemployed. And they look desperately for a job. "The Other Fields" sheds a new and completely different light on the mythologies of contemporary football. While some may think that “bling-bling” and “glitz” is all there is to modern football, Marco Kugel’s and Simon Quack’s film shows the intricate economic and moral complexities behind the façade of entertainment. Dreams only last a season or two.

Philipp Fleischmann develops special cameras designed to formulate specific relations between the material of the footage (16 or 35 mm film) and the object of the recording. For instance, in his 2013 project “Main Hall,” he deconstructs the main exhibition hall of the Viennese Secession, filming the exhibition architecture with 19 individual cameras and thus creating images that show the view of the exhibition space onto itself. Fleischmann’s recent work, “Untitled (Generali Foundation Vienna)" identifies the film camera as a spacial object-form by itself. Correlating with the history of artistic interventions on site, the object is placed in the former exhibition space of the Generali Foundation at Wiedner Hauptstrasse 15, Vienna, and provided with a cinematographic view.

Breath Text is a powerfully simple performance in which VALIE EXPORT creates tension by breathing compulsively. “she breathes heavily at the video camera lens while slowly moving her face across it, fogging up the entire space with her lung’s volume. Her piece takes Olson’s breathy poem ‘Gli Amanti’ a step further, not just aiming to capture the particularities of one’s pronunciation in an individual speech act but substituting the specific make her body creates – her ‘breath text,’ the moist gasp on the window glass in front of her – for the signs one would use to write an actual, linguistic ‘love poem.’” – Lisa Siraganian

An experimental documentary shot on Super 8 detailing festive gatherings of a multitude of immigrant communities in Vienna. Different cultures from all over the world are shown celebrating, dancing, singing or performing rituals. Simultaneously the filmmaker, through a voice-over, ponders the question on how to purposefully assemble and categorize all the footage, thus giving us insight into how documentaries are made and the thought process that goes into it.

Greece – The Legend of the Holy Drinker, a story of trials and tribulations. In his third solo program, Thomas Stipsits encounters the Greek gods as a tourist on the island of Karpathos, who suspect him of being a new Hercules. Like the legendary hero, he too must pass twelve tests. The heartless gods of Olympus certainly do not mean well for Stipsits-Buam. He encounters Jörg Haider, who, like Hitler shortly before his downfall in the Führer's bunker, suffers from a massive loss of reality, and Wolfgang Ambros, who is working on an album of recipes. Schifoan mutates into Grießschmarrn.

Burmese citizens on the run, oppressed for decades by a brutal military dictatorship, still, to this day, fleeing into an uncertain future. Often having lost everything, all that remains are their dreams; their bad dreams of the past in Burma, but also dreams of hope for a better future. We meet these people in different countries and different situations.

Parallel Space: Inter-View is made with a photo camera. A miniature photo is exactly the size of two film frames. Optically it resembles a flickering double exposure; the former temporal and spatial unity disintegrates into pieces which have a correspondence with each other. (Peter Tscherkassky) Photographic processes - the material transformations involved in recording, developing, printing and projecting - functions as metaphors for psychological processes.

A subversive and experimental film by Otto Muehl.

Fragments of several (mostly) silent films are shown. They're guided by quotes from, among others, Plato and Sappho and a soundtrack.

The uninterrupted light trail of one year and ten months, condensed down to 20 minutes, filmed on a self-made camera. Daily rhythms accelerate, slowly at first, then more intensely. A structuralist film about transience.

A liquid form inevitably penetrates an empty space.

We accompany our heroes, Tim & Trixi Tropf, on their exciting journey from a rain cloud over the mountains of Lower Austria and Styria through Vienna's mountain spring pipelines to the Austrian capital. After an adventure in the bathtub, Tim & Trixi discover Vienna.

With the appearance of bearded men in nuns' costumes, collecting money for the needy members of the gay community, the Sistory of the "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence" started in San Francisco at Easter 1979. Since than, the Sisters have developed a wide network of "Houses" and "Orders" in numerous countries. They support gay, lesbian and transgender organizations as well as Aids projects.

Norbert Pfaffenbichler pieces together clips from 160 James Mason films to examine the eternally urbane star's career.

Starting in the early nineties in Eastern Europe, an Asian fungus has gradually conquered the European continent, infecting almost all ash trees. The symptoms are very severe, many cases leading to the death of most trees. As a result, it is assumed that the ash tree in Europe will soon be close to extinct. Choreographer and dancer Dagmar Dachauer was inspired by the sad faith of the European ash tree, and linked it to the personal loss in her own life. Finis est cinis: Ash is what remains. Ash is a eulogy for the ash tree and for Prasthan Dachauer, who passed away in 2016.

Overfart is a disembodied passage through a landscape which is inaccessible to humans, a landscape which is not a part of nature but an intellectual construct: In its artificiality, this work refers to Early-Romantic landscape painting­especially that of C.D. Friedrich­and its immanent religiosity. Though temko by general magic is virtually the sole element of the soundtrack, this work was not intended to be a music video. The abstract spatiality of the music, which was apparently set in contrast to the images, and their cycles complement one another to produce the same intangibility.

An experimental Austrian film

The protagonist of the legendary Krzysztof Kieslowski film "Night Porter's Point of View" revisited 30 years later.

Recomposing teeth gestures.

We spend the majority of our lives in a kind of hibernation, functional but separate from the source of our being. What can we do to wake up? Catharina Roland explores this crucial question, inviting us to share in her deeply enriching journey to discover how we can be whole again, how we can heal ourselves and the environment we live in, and how we can leave the cocoons of our perception to face our own selfishness and fears. Through lessons from visionaries and spiritual teachers as well as numerous exercises, Awake in the Dream gives us the tools to break down the walls of the person we have created for ourselves. Complete the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly. Tap into the potential that has existed since the beginning of time, and wake up to the wholeness that awaits each and every one of us.

What is Breakcore? Breakcore is the "bastard hate child" of jungle, happy hardcore, gabba, speedcore, drum 'n' bass, techno, IDM, acid, ragga, electro, dub, country, industrial, noise, grindcore, classical music, hardcore, metal and punk.

In Gustav Deutsch's most recent found footage work the masses "absorb" (Walter Benjamin), the artwork. Three historical camera pans across the streets and squares of Vienna, Surabaya, and Porto provide a starting point for reflection on the relationship of everyday stories and cinematic machinery.

Aufgezeichnet in der Burgarena Finkenstein Grossartig, die Szenerie der Burgarena Finkenstein. Josef Hader, der Solist, weiß entsprechend damit umzugehen. Die unsichere Gewissheit, dass der Mensch nur einmal lebt, hat viele Gesichter. Josef Hader vertont diese Gesichter in "privat" und macht uns wieder mit ihnen vertraut. "Privat" ist gleichzeitig eine Verweigerung gegen und eine Verteidigung für alle, die dieses autonomste Rollenspiel des Menschenrechts als nicht normal abgestempelt wissen wollen. Beruhigend ist das nicht, nur befreiend.

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Report of a journey by bus and motor scooter from the Adriatic Sea to the Danube River.

Erase is a period piece in the fictional world of the 1940's. During World War II a German doctor found a method to predict if an unborn child is going to commit murder at some point in his life. 20 years later, in the 1960's a journalist interviews Dr. Klein and reveals one of the doctor's past cases.

A green shape hops across a shaded red background, to the three-beat rhythm produced by the alternating sound of an increasingly muffled high-pitched tinkle and a deeply resonant low note. At the same time, the color green turns turquoise and gradually spreads. Something awakens and stretches, the image's center of gravity shifts from the vertical to the horizontal plane...

A bowl on the ground. The fallen leaves around it reference autumn. A letter enters the frame—aged hands tear it up, and its pieces fall into the bowl, not unlike leaves. Later, these pieces are burned amidst the darkness. The traces of a love story now over?

An idyllic summer scene : A sleeping woman reclines between two trees, a straw hat covering her knees and her double circling her form.

Just Like the Movies is an attempt to re-construct the events of 9/11 by highlighting the parallels between the fictive worlds and the images of the real events.

After a car accident, Sebastian contracts an uncanny sleeping sickness. Every day he sleeps a minute longer than the preceding day. Sebastian attempts to find out on his own what sleep is.

Merab, Nino, Levan and Ludmila talk about their town, Tbilissi, the capital of Georgia, in a film both tragic and beautiful. Tbilisi in the first year after independence and shortly before the civil war, Sarajevo at the end of the war in what once was Yugoslavia. In Goran Rebić’s DURING THE MANY YEARS, people tell of the changes experienced since the breakaway from the Soviet Union.

What if the World Trade Center attacks could have been thwarted? This is one of the theories put forward by Bill Binney, former technical director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), who resigned after 9/11. Long before Edward Snowden, he denounced the intelligence services' inadequate methods in the fight against terrorism, particularly the massive collection of data. Drowned in a continuous flow of information, analysts are unable to exploit the data quickly. In the 1990s, a program called "ThinThread," implemented by the NSA, was supposed to allow targeted searches by focusing solely on useful metadata for tracing the communications of suspicious individuals. But a few weeks before the 9/11 attack, the project was abandoned in favor of private financial interests. In the United States, the surveillance market is thus 80% owned by private companies.