A Movie ABC takes a close look at the relationship between cinema (or, more generally, image) and writing, which, since the origins of cinema, have almost always gone hand in hand and ensured that the narrative can develop on several levels.
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.
In just five minutes, Maria Lassnig has managed to represent her complete poetics in her Selfportrait, making a short film that rightfully ranks as one of her most intimate, personal and representative works, with an interesting and essential stop-motion animation.
While Baroque Statues – Austrian painter Maria Lassnig’s first short film – was already a particularly good work, Iris, her next film, made in 1971, ranks as a natural completion of her previous work, as well as the perfect summa of the artist’s poetry.