An anguished sense of death and claustrophobia pervades Radetzkymarsch, directed by Michael Kehlmann in 1964 and an adaptation of Joseph Roth’s homonymous novel. The Habsburg monarchy, for its part, seems to us like a kind of golden cage. A cage inside which Carl Joseph and his father Franz, the film’s protagonists, are prisoners.
In the ensemble film Viennese Girls, director, painter and photographer Kurt Steinwendner – so fascinated by Italian Neorealism that he was inspired by it in every way – draws a fresco of a hardly recovering Vienna after World War II, in which what seems most difficult is to make ends meet, due to the job insecurity that sadly combines with the inhuman conditions of the workers.