THE FIRST DAY
Herbert Holba’s cinema, as well as that of many of his colleagues and friends, marks with The First Day the beginning of a new Austrian film movement, in which an attempt was made to break away from national film canons by trying new ways of staging, new ways of understanding the seventh art, new ways of experimenting. And this, then, is also the case with The First Day, set in a no-man’s-land between yesterday and tomorrow and drawing heavily from yesterday to tell of an unusual, possible tomorrow.