Misfire shows strong influences from Post-Neorealism. Yet we must also acknowledge that this feature film has a strong personality of its own, which reveals just how great the desire was to ‘break free’ from the conventions of Austrian cinema. Restored by Filmarchiv Austria and available on the Filmarchiv On channel.
Fights, suspicious policemen, a mysterious robbery and an encounter that can only cause unnecessary trouble: Der Einstand, Christoph Waltz’s debut feature, is a beautiful film about how youthful mistakes can also have consequences in the present and about the difficulty in being accepted by society, which is unable to completely detach itself from the stigma of imprisonment.
Tales from the Vienna Woods is set in the early 1930s, but tells a story that could happen today, as well as tomorrow. Two stage actors introduce the audience to the stories of the protagonists at the Belvedere Gardens. Maximilian Schell’s camera immediately shows us a man from the back as the sun sets. An image that will recur frequently throughout the feature film along with numerous totals and pan shots necessary to maintain a certain detachment.
We are spared nothing, during the screening of Meatgrinder. The director, with an extremely essential approach, gets straight to the point. And, likewise, a harsh, deliberately dirty aesthetic is perfectly appropriate for what Houchang Allayari wanted to denounce in this short but important film of his.
Mother’s Day – Harald Sicheritz’s debut feature, which, alongside an often excessively fragmented plot, features an overall good characterisation of upper-class Austrian society – has become, over the years, a true cult within contemporary Austrian cinema.
I Love Vienna presents itself as a colourful and cheerful fresco of society, in which controversial topics are raised – especially concerning the various cultural differences and the different ways of understanding marriage and love relationships in general – but all this is done in an ironic way, through a skilful script that sees numerous misunderstandings and paradoxes as its most important peculiarities.
There is apparently no way of salvation for the protagonists of Götz Spielmann’s Revanche (as in any other work by the Austrian director). This implicit cosmic pessimism – filled, in its own way, with a subtle religiousness – assumes immediately a universal connotation concerning every historical period.
With a sophisticated black and white that recalls the cinematography of Katzelmacher (Fassbinder’s first film, 1969), The Pacific Ocean – the first feature by Xaver Schwarzenberger, Fassbinder’s long-time assistant – is a work that, in its own way, has become a milestone in Austrian and German cinema of the 1980s.
Watching a film like Exit…but no Panic, Franz Novotny’s first feature film, can be compared to a rollercoaster ride. Irreverent, shocking, surprising, funny and amusing, this work has become a real cult in Austrian cinema.