In Flipper it is the cold, deafening and disturbing noise of the marbles within the game that takes centre stage. The woman speaks, but her words are inaudible. The man and the woman are close, but suddenly unable to move, since they seem to be tied in a sort of straitjacket. They both make faces and everything, for a moment, takes a deliberately grotesque turn.
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.