The Mozart Minute
Twenty-eight well-known filmmakers living and working in Austria were invited by WIENER MOZARTJAHR 2006, to produce associative miniatures on Mozart. Requirement: they had to be one-minute artistic short films. The directors come from a whole range of different backgrounds, ranging from animated, experimental and short film to documentaries and feature films. The result is a multi-facetted sampler of diverse formal and contextual positions with regard to Mozart’s person and his influence on today’s society, art and culture. The contributions run the gamut from experimental-conceptual statements through socio-critical and documentary observations to pithy short feature films.
Michael Glawogger
Jessica Hausner
Ulrich Seidl
Houchang Allahyari
Sabine Derflinger
Barbara Gräftner
Wolfgang Glück
Gustav Deutsch
Ruth Beckermann
Siegfried A. Fruhauf
Also Directed by Michael Glawogger
Set within a Viennese apartment block, this affectionate Austrian comedy makes fun of the strange habits of the famed city's residents. The building is located in a middle-class area and has residents from many age groups and walks of life. Many of the tenants are much older, but there are also a few children about. In one apartment lives a large group of Polish construction workers, while a Yugoslavian woman and her huge family attempt to survive in their tiny flat. The episodic story of the lives of these and other tenants is framed by a visit from a civil servant from the Office of Statistics.
More than two years after the sudden death of Michael Glawogger in April 2014, film editor Monika Willi realizes a film out of the film footage produced during 4 months and 19 days of shooting in the Balkans, Italy, Northwest and West Africa. A journey into the world to observe, listen and experience, the eye attentive, courageous and raw. Serendipity is the concept - in shooting as well as in editing the film.
The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.
4 directors decided to investigate why Jörg Haider's far right "Freedom Party" won the election in Austria in 1999.
Megacities is a documentary about the slums of five different metropolitan cities.
FRANKREICH WIR KOMMEN is a highly enjoyable documentary, obviously intended for TV, but showing at film festivals. It shows us the highlights of the 1998 World Cup Championships in France through the eyes of several interesting and diverse fans of the Austrian national team. Entertaining, even for those not interested in football.
Gangster boss Carlos orders the dodgy Viennese junkyard owner Harry to bring him a bag from Poland. Harry passes the order on to his "best man" Schorsch. Schorsch, not exactly the brightest, is currently without a driver's license and completely fixated on the 24-hour car race of Le Mans. So he gives the order to Mao and sends in their place the takeaway lessees Hans and Max to Poland. Their journey leads to a seemingly endless drug trip full of extraordinary phenomena.
A street in Oakland. Early morning hours. A motion. Music. A few sound bits. Someone paints the wall of a studio. Colors. Broken televisions. A street in Oakland. Early morning hours. A motion. Different music. Columbus. End.
Ever had an idea for a film? Ever actually visualised this film in your mind? Or even sketched out scenes and camera angles? Plenty of film buffs have. Michael Glawogger invited 12 people to talk about their ideas for a film and then shot short fragments for them. The result is a crime-story-erotic-lyrical-experimental-vampire-fantasy-horror-soap-opera-splatter-trash-road-movie-melodrama posing as a documentary!
For his friend and colleague Michael Glawogger (who directed the rest of the film), Ulrich Seidl contributed a series of existential documentary scenes from 1980's Vienna.
Also Directed by Jessica Hausner
Christine is a wheelchair-using woman with severe multiple sclerosis. In order to escape her isolation, she makes a journey to Lourdes, the iconic site of pilgrimage in the Pyrenees Mountains, along with other people with varying disabilities. During her stay she begins to regain the use of her limbs. This is in contrast with others, who appear to have stronger faith than Christine but experience only slight, passing improvement. Her fellow pilgrims are eager to call it a miracle; however, as the pilgrimage draws to a close, exactly how accurate a claim this is becomes uncertain.
A movie about the possibility to be happy—or about the impossibility of the same. A young man interviews people on the street. He asks them about the substance of their lives in order to find answers for himself, but he cannot find any. Then, a young woman: after a couple of disappointments, she finds the happy side of life—she finds something like love. They meet each other…
A "romantic comedy" based loosely on the suicide of the poet Henrich von Kleist in 1811.
The heroine of the title grows up. Slights, dance school, a cinema of glances, of tender moments, of trivial pop songs. A cinema which takes time, makes observations and which continuously finds or invents opposite picture sequences for loneliness and breaking free...
Rita is an outcast teenager in suburban Austria, misunderstood both at school, where she's disdained by classmates, and at home, where her staunchly religious mother and temperamental father bemoan her inability to fit in with their comfortable bourgeois life. When Rita sets out to seduce her school bus driver, she sets in motion a series of events that changes everyone's lives irrevocably.
This video installation pays unnervingly close attention to domestic routine, portraying a young woman in the kitchen methodically preparing food. This quotidian ritual slowly comes to feel like a sort of obsessive sublimation of more obscure psychic energies.
When Irene takes a position at a hotel deep in the woods of the Austrian Alps, she soon discovers the girl she replaced vanished without a trace. Is there a murderer on site, or are there even darker forces at work?
A teacher takes a job at an elite school and forms a strong bond with five students — a relationship that eventually takes a dangerous turn.
Alice, a single mother who is more dedicated to her work as a genetic engineer than to her teenage son Joe, develops a new variety of flower that is supposed to have the ability to make its owner happy thanks to its special chemical properties.
Also Directed by Ulrich Seidl
Hope, the third film in the PARADISE TRILOGY, tells the story of the 13-year-old Melanie. While her mother (Teresa) travels to Kenya, Melanie spends her holiday in the Austrian countryside at a strict diet camp for overweight teenagers. Under the supervision of a tattooed trainer and a creepy doctor, the teenagers attempt to do sports during the day and secretly get drunk in the evening. Between physical education and nutrition counseling, pillow fights and her first cigarette, Melanie falls in love with the doctor who is 40 years her senior.
In conurbations where hundreds of thousands live alongside one another, in the era of a highly technological society, in which communication has never played such a significant role, man has become lonely. Disappointed by his fellow human beings, he turns to animals. Dogs and other domestic animals serve him as companions, life partners, cuddly objects and bedfellows.
Six Catholics share their thoughts and problems with Jesus in different churches. The camera accompanies them.
A nurse from the Ukraine searches for a better life in the West, while an unemployed security guard from Austria heads East for the same reason. Both are looking for work, a new beginning, an existence, struggling to believe in themselves, to find a meaning in life..
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Two men, two brothers, their childhood home in Lower Austria. They drink to their late mother, they bury her. Then they drive back to their real lives. One back to Romania, to resume living his newly begun life, the other to Rimini, to go back to dreaming his old dream. But sooner or later both their pasts will catch up with them.
Main character of this movie is Rene Rupnik, a former math teacher. He is forty years old and lives together with his mother in a desolate block of flats. Ever since his early youth women with big breasts have fascinated him, because they symbolise a kind of earth mother to him. He has never had an especially close relationship with his own mother; she was too 'bony' for him. Object of Rene's fantasy is the actress Senta Berger, to him everything a woman should be. Standing by the blackboard and explaining the mathematical laws of sine and cosine ('sinus' is bosom in Latin), Rene sings the praises of the female curves and those of Santa Berger in particular. Filmmaker Ulrich Seidl let the former teacher speak freely about his obsessions and desires, intercutting his monologues with scenes from the protagonist's day-to-day life.
Looks at two communities on either side of the Czech - Austrian border. There's an elderly man in Austria looking for a new wife, and he meets a lone single woman on the Czech side of the border.
Disappointed by failed relationships and the demands set by local women, more and more Austrians search for happiness in a marriage with women from Thailand and the Philippines. Asked about the positive properties of their Asian spouses, the answer of the Austrian husbands quite often is, "They don't talk back." Protagonist of the film is Karl S., a teacher in Vienna in his forties. Following his failed marriage he is now seeking a durable partnership and is on the lookout for a wife who doesn't question her traditional role. His solution: a wife from the Far East. Karl S. rounds up experiences and visits several mixed couples to get a clearer picture and to have his idea proven right. The film accompanies him on his search for the ideal woman and gives an insight into the imagination of these "last real men" who at the beginning seem to have hit the jackpot with their decisions
Africa. In the wild expanses, where bush-bucks, impalas, zebras, gnus and other creatures graze by the thousands, they are on holiday. German and Austrian hunting tourists drive through the bush, lie in wait, stalk their prey. They shoot, sob with excitement and pose before the animals they have bagged. A vacation movie about killing, a movie about human nature.
Also Directed by Houchang Allahyari
I love Vienna is a social comedy that explores the clash of cultures and values.
Story about a young pianist accused of murdering his teacher who slowly comes to believe the accusation due to guilt feelings, ultimately retreating into a fantasy world.
The film tells the story of three young men who land in an Austrian prison for various reasons. They have been sentenced for minor misdemeanors and are confronted by the prisons merciless subculture.
As a young stranger enters the life of a rich but emotionally paralyzed family, everything changes.
Documentary about Ute Bock
It all begins with a mistake, an error with serious consequences: in a hospital the new-born babies of an Austrian couple and a Turkish family of immigrant workers are mixed up and go home with the wrong parents. By the time the mistake comes to light, it emerges that the Turkish family, including the baby, has been deported. The despairing Austrian couple begins a confusing odyssey through Turkey in order to track down the unsuspecting family to their native village. But they are not at all convinced that the babies have been mixed up. It is decided that the only way to know for sure is to have a blood test done. It is decided that the blood work is done in Vienna due to the better medical resources, but that will be far from simple. It will involve an illegal smuggling of the Turks across the Austrian border.
Also Directed by Sabine Derflinger
Johanna Dohnal, whose political career spans three decades, was one of the very first explicitly feminist politicians in Europe. As a member of the Austrian socialist government and the first Austrian minister for Women’s Affairs from 1990 to 1994, Dohnal was responsible for founding Austria’s first women’s refuge as well as criminalizing of marital rape. Yet her legacy remains yet to be discovered and re-examined. DIE DOHNAL makes a first step, and it makes Dohnal come alive.
Tatort is a long-running German/Austrian/Swiss, crime television series set in various parts of these countries. The show is broadcast on the channels of ARD in Germany, ORF 2 in Austria and SF1 in Switzerland. The first episode was broadcast on November 29, 1970. The opening sequence for the series has remained the same throughout the decades, which remains highly unusual for any such long-running TV series up to date. Each of the regional TV channels which together form ARD, plus ORF and SF, produces its own episodes, starring its own police inspector, some of which, like the discontinued Schimanski, have become cultural icons. The show appears on DasErste and ORF 2 on Sundays at 8:15 p.m. and currently about 30 episodes are made per year. As of March 2013, 865 episodes in total have been produced. Tatort is currently being broadcast in the United States on the MHz Worldview channel under the name Scene of the Crime.
Life in a residential community, founded 14 years ago by Annemarie and Fritz Pronegg for neglected, mistreated and abused children. The consequences of violence suffered are constantly present. Those affected tell of the effects and difficulties of living with the past.
The U.S. scholarships Austrian student Inge and young mining student from Burma Sao Kya Seng fall in love. But it's only at the lavish wedding ceremony that Inge discovers her husband is the ruling prince of the Shan state of Burma. After a coup staged by the Burmese military, Sao is imprisoned. Inge does everything she can to free him. Base on the true story of Inge Sargent.
Also Directed by Barbara Gräftner
A group of swim-crazy men in Frankfurt don't want to swim straight ahead any longer. A documentary dealing with a group of gay men who cannot be stopped by anything from realizing their dream of floating. Europe's only male synchronized swimming group performs striking supporting shows at swimming championships and is a constant part - not only - of the gay world of sports.
All sorts of trouble arise within a Viennese middle-class family, when they are visited by a bunch of Russian relatives.
Also Directed by Wolfgang Glück
The film presents the political events surrounding the Anschluss in March of 1938 through the lives of Carola Hell, a popular young actress at the prestigious Theater in der Josefstadt, and Martin Hofmann, the Jewish journalist she plans to marry. When we encounter the couple in the lovely springtime weather their future is full of promise. They are determined to stay clear of politics. Yet in the climate of the time, nobody of her prominence or his religion can remain apolitical. Although Martin's journalist friend, Drechsler, calls to inform them that the Nazis plan to take over Austria soon, they concentrate on their work and their private happiness and dismiss the warnings.
Also Directed by Gustav Deutsch
The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.
A condensed omnibus of all twelve chapters of Film ist. by Gustav Deutsch. Chapters 1-6 consists almost exclusively, of sequences from existing scientific films, while chapters 7-12 is a collection of moving pictures from the first thirty years of a medium which was then still silent.
The pictures are burning. A house is in flames for exactly one minute. Cinema under attack: An anonymous fragment from the early days of film is turned into a reflection on reproduction and reality as well as on destruction which takes place on two levels through Gustav Deutsch’s reworking of the material.
100 film loops for 100 film-viewers. Each loop deals with one basic aspect of repetition in life and film. The essential characteristics of each aspect become evident by endless repetition in the loop. "With the Pocket Cinema project I want to trace the repetitions in life and film as an attempt at the essential elements of film - motion and time.
Mariage Blanc in Morocco means a sham marriage between a Moroccan man and a European woman in order to obtain a residence permit and thereafter the citizenship of a European country. The theme of Mariage Blanc is this very intimate form of attempted immigration which is, for Mostafa Tabbou, simultaneously fiction and reality. The film was shot in three days in July of 1996 in the Hotel de Paris in Casablanca, Morocco.
21 fragments of a feature film, made in India, found in casablance, adapted in Vienna.
A series of snapshots from the life of a fictional actress named Shirley serves to weave together thirteen paintings by Edward Hopper (e.g. "Office at Night", "Western Motel", "Usherette", "A Woman in the Sun") into a fascinating synthesis of painting and film, personal and political history. Each station in Shirley’s professional and private life from the 1930s to 1960s is precisely dated: It is always August 28/29 of the year in question, as the locations vary from Paris to New York to Cape Cod.
ADRIA is an artistic analysis of film as a medium and of its meaning as SCHOOL OF SEEING. The subjects of this analysis are the beginnings of the Austrian hobby and amateur film creation, restricted to holiday movies from the Adriatic Sea. The footage was analyzed according to set focal points (image detail, camera movement, etc.) then dissected according to serial aspects (tracking shots, pans, etc.) and edited into new sequences (descriptions, reactions, etc.) These sequences are liberated from their individual isolation and unified in a sequence that reflects the general situation. This general situation reflects upon two aspects. One is the first active involvement with film as a medium - in front of and behind the camera - and the other aspect highlights social contexts such as the first holiday abroad and organizing one’s leisure time.Therefore the private depiction of an individual situation becomes a document of a general situation.
Also Directed by Ruth Beckermann
Based on material that emerged during the occupation of the arena in the summer of 1976, the film shows the organization of collective work, the negotiations with the city and community and finally the demolition of the buildings.
Introduced with a quote that invents its own creator, someone is dancing in a figure skating costume to a piece of music that conceals its source.
Four 12-year-olds—Sharon, Tom, Moishy, and Sophie—prepare for their bar or bat mitzvot.
In this documentary road movie, Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann records the diverse views and activities of Israelis and Arabs as she travels along the route from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Marc Aurel-Straße in Vienna: The last surviving Jewish textile merchant in the former textile district, the Iranian hotel proprietor and the Café Salzgries and its regulars. Between the summer of 1999 and spring 2000, Ruth Beckermann undertook a series of small journeys on and around her own doorstep and investigated her local area with the help of a film crew. This documentary film also gives an insight into the political changes when a far right Party joined the Government coalition in Austria.
It’s not uncommon for a film to have a moving love story at its core. Yet this particular set-up is unusual. The lovers here are Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, both important representatives of post-war German-language poetry. The story of the relationship between the Austrian and the Jew from Czernowitz is told through their nearly 20-year correspondence (1948–1967). Or, more precisely, by a young woman and a young man reading from their letters in a studio in Vienna’s venerable Funkhaus.
Images of Egypt: prolonged tracking shots through the streets of Cairo, cafes, bazars, hotels and gardens, footage of the desert and the sea. Ruth Beckermann is on the trail of Empress Elisabeth of Austria ("Sissi"), who travelled the world restlessly and was in Egypt incognito one hundred years earlier. Since Elisabeth refused to be photographed after the age of 31, she inspires projections and fantasies.
The film "DIE KINDER VON WIEN" accompanies schoolchildren from a so-called "Brennpunkt"-school in Vienna-Favoriten through the third grade of elementary school, which will determine their future education.
On March 28th 1981, 10.000 people take to the streets. The city of Judenburg demonstrates for the preservation of their steel plant. The demonstration is a start, a late attempt to avert the threat of job loss. The film shows how the international steel crisis affects Austria.
Also Directed by Siegfried A. Fruhauf
The dynamic performance of drummer Jörg Mikula serves as the trigger for a new work by Siegfried Fruhauf that explores the reciprocal relationship between the two time-based media of film and music in a wild way. WHERE DO WE GO reveals itself to be a synesthetic experiment rendering sight as rhythmical and the visual edit as musical. The filmmaker painstakingly animates brief phases of movement recorded with a Lomography Supersampler* to create a visual series of trains, tracks, bridges and nature that are re-constellated and brought together in a multiple split-screen projection.
FUDDY DUDDY uses the motif of the grid to blow it to pieces. Being occupied with structural film, I repeatedly draw 'frame plans', using grid structures to precisely record the succession of individual images. To me, this sometimes seems like a search for structures in an apparently chaotic world. The medium of film fulfils the need for orientation. (Siegfried A. Fruhauf)
Exposed uses short scene from a feature film – a man observes a dancing woman through a keyhole – as the raw material. Solely fragments of this tableau are visible to the viewer, and Fruhauf "re-exposes" the scene by passing the perforations of a strip of film in front of the projector so that they resemble a moving sieve. While the moving stencil allows us to see no more than portions of the scene, the narration's "peeping tom" motif is repeated in our own perception. Sight can no longer be taken for granted and therefore increases in fascination. Fruhauf also breaks up the intended movement of the found footage on the temporal level. The apparent irregularity of the fields of light scanning over the strip of film is juxtaposed with a metronomically precise rhythm which segments the scene. Successive shots often vary to no more than a minimal degree. Similar to a record album with a crack, the progression shifts in minute but regular ways.
The raw material used in Blow-up comprises two shots from an old educational film about first aid: A man demonstrates mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a life-size dummy; the dummy´s chest rises and falls. Fruhauf introduces this scene into his own métier, turning the "blow-up" metaphor into an image with a false bottom. With the aid of a digital photocopier, the strip of film was reduced in size to a narrow ribbon, and Blow-up shows this transformation in reverse.
Like a Santiago Álvarez squared (or multiplied by 4K, to be more precise), Siegfried A. Fruhauf –a descendant of Austria’s Great Generation of Tscherkassky, Deutsch and Arnold– rede- fines with Vintage Print the power of film as imagination, at the service of an amazing economy of resources. If the pioneer of Cuban montage cinema became immortal when he left us his phrase “give me two photographs, a moviola, and some music, and I’ll make you a film,” Fruhauf slims down that recipe by cre- ating thirteen hyperkinetic minutes out of a single, century-old glass negative in decomposition. Ranging from figurative to ab- stract art, analogy to digital, and documentary to experimental, Vintage Print’s definitive achievement is that it reverses a road movie in its own terms, and the first thing that is left behind is the very same notion of cinema.
Ground Control is a rough video miniature. It begins with the simplest and most fundamental thing the electronic moving-image machine has to offer: the uncontrolled beam of electrons directed across a photoelectric layer of cesium oxide lining a Braun tube, or snow. Recording this chaos involves a fascination that existed during the early days of film: the repeatability of a unique event. A visual sequence which has never before existed and will never happen again becomes reproducible, thereby losing the status of the chaotic. This idea, a result of the desire to control an uncontrollable world, is the beginning of the chain of associations in this video, which randomly acting ants push their way into. The image of them crawling is manipulated in the reproduced images, distortion of their movement is forced upon them. The insects become monsters when, after being locked into the frame, they suddenly burst into the (snow)storm as a sequence of individuals.
Movements of industrial meat processing machines cast in cinematic structures. Bloodless cinema. Heartbeat of the apparatus.
Etüde draws on early avant-garde film theories and practices, on the utopia of the absolute film: hearing pictures, seeing music. With the technique of hand-drawn sound, the film medium becomes the instrument, something playable. Fruhauf allows us to take part in this process, gets the sound creaking and places a hand in the picture as a subject – where it increasingly threatens to rebel against its forced role.
Found footage experimental film.
SUN – which is not necessarily typical for the genre – consists of nothing more than a dozen static shots with little or no movement. The main subject of both the video and the song's lyrics are identical. But this is not immediately obvious: In a slow reverse zoom the white glare filling the picture is gradually revealed to be the sun's ball of light surrounded by a green-ish yellow blaze.