In our VIENNALE DAILIES you'll find everything you need to know about what's happening around the festival!
QUOTE OF THE DAY
An abandonment roiled in me, like termites in a fallen log.
(Werner Herzog)
NEED SOME FILMTIPS? HERE ARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS:
MATTER OUT OF PLACE
R: Nikolaus Geyrhalter
MO, 24.10. 6pm: GARTENBAUKINO
TUE, 25.10. 3pm: STADTKINO IM KÜNSTLERHAUS
At one point in Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s documentary, a hard cut leads from the Swiss mountains to a paradise island atoll. The connection here is always garbage. The image of a truck full of litter hanging from a gondola being transported down the mountain still reverberates in the mind; in the next moment, even the turquoise Maldivian idyll proves to be a mirage. Without the work of garbage collectors, one would be relaxing on the beach next to plastic bottles. But the trash is just taken to the nearest island and burned there with fatal consequences. MATTER OUT OF PLACE is built entirely of such miniatures of garbage disposal, making it a no less troubling follow-up to ERDE, in which Geyrhalter turned his attention to the malformations of the Anthropocene. The difference this time is that he focuses on the process of garbage removal (almost) without words: the circular structure of the film, in which trash is collected, transported, separated and crushed globally at great expense, creates the impression that it basically never really disappears. Geyrhalter’s eye for the downright absurd efforts of humans is tinged with irony. Divers making garbage in bags rise like jellyfish – even poetic images like this hardly distract from the impossibility of the task. (Dominik Kamalzadeh)
SILVER BIRD AND RAINBOW FISH
R: Lei Lei
MO, 24.10. 11 am: URANIA
The father and the grandfather speak in voiceover, their accounts complementing one another as they tell the grandson, the filmmaker, the story of the family. They speak with forbearance and composure, although the story they tell is hardly a happy one, an account of tenderness and caring, but also of separation, bereavement, forced relocation, ridicule, reeducation, censorship, hardship; it is the story of China in the 20th century too. In creating images to narrate this story, the filmmaker takes his bearings as much from its immutable stations as from the fluidity of memory, whereby individual recollection is always collective too. Propaganda materials thus deliver motifs and backdrops alike, populated with bright colors, malleable figures and fantastical creatures as shifting and surreal as the times they represent, while lurid plasticine faces breathe strange new life into family photographs and can be flattened out and reshaped as needed, just like in real life. Perhaps the best way to deal with such trauma is to transform it into endless flights of fancy, all silver birds and rainbow fish, untethered, unbound. If history boxes in and makes rigid, liberation lies in how you look back, in blissful pliability. (James Lattimer)
NO ABRAS NUNCA ESA PUERTA
R: Carlos Hugo Christensen
MO, 24.10. 13:45 Uhr: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL
The film adapts two unrelated stories by William Irish. The first story, ALGUIEN AL TELÉFONO, is an almost abstract mystery that makes us believe we know something that we actually don’t, with the same thing happening to the main male character, played by Ángel Magaña. Christensen extracts the most from a very tight plot, the tortured beauty of Renée Dumas and a payoff that deepens the mystery instead of solving it. The second story (EL PÁJARO CANTOR VUELVE AL HOGAR) begins more or less conventionally, before growing into a work of major suspense due to the fact that one of the main characters is blind and plays a very active role in the plot.
The great German cinematographer Pablo Tabernero (née Peter Paul Weinschenk) did amazing work in this film, particularly in a sequence that works at very narrow limit between what can and can’t be seen. Christensen initially intended to present three of William Irish’s tales in one long feature but the production company decided that the resulting running time would not be ideal for the commercial distribution. So they asked him to cut two different films, with NO ABRAS NUNCA ESA PUERTA as the second one.
AKITSU ONSEN
R: Yoshida Kijū
MO, 24.10. 6pm: FILMMUSEUM
AKITSU SPRINGS is one of Yoshida’s best known films in Japan, where it was a commercial success, as it was designed to be. Based on a popular novel, the plot serves as a showcase for star Okada Mariko in her 100th film (as the opening title proclaims). Yoshida makes the romantic story into a work of melancholy perfection: as much an attack on Japanese melodrama as a nonpareil example of it. Yoshida emphasizes the obsessiveness of his two doomed lovers. Their relationship, which the film follows over 17 years, is built on perverse self-sacrifice and an unpayable debt. Over time, they gain more sophisticated insights into themselves, even as they repeat the same gestures and patterns (“I feel I’ve lived my whole life just watching you leave over and over again,” Okada tells Nagato Hiroyuki).
Shooting in glorious color and making expansive use of rural locations in Okayama, Yoshida contrives to find endless ways to relate his actors to architecture, landscape, light and shadow. The result is at once a classic of doomed romance, a melodrama whose visual splendor can be ranked alongside the best works of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray, and a richly nuanced, theoretical epic on the violent birth of modern Japan. (Chris Fujiwara)
SOME OF OUR GUESTS TODAY
Werner Herzog
Director of
THEATER OF THOUGHT
THE FIRE WITHIN:
A REQUIEM FOR KATIA AND MAURICE KRAFFT
Goran Rebić
Director of
DURING THE MANY YEARS
Jan Soldat
Director of
BLIND DATE
STAGING DEATH
Sasha Pirker
Director of
GEWESEN SEIN WIRD
Chantal Kaufmann
Director of
IMAGINE LANGUAGE
(DAY_00, DAY_03, DAY_01)
Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Director of
MATTER OUT OF PLACE
James Benning
Director of
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Peter Hengl
Director of
FAMILY DINNER
Alejo Moguillansky
Director of
LA EDAD MEDIA
WHAT IS HAPPENING AT THE VIENNALE CLUB?
PANEL - from 6pm:
MASCULINITY: BETWEEN TO BE AND NOT TO BE
With: Ruth Beckermann (MUTZENBACHER) und Albert Serra (PACIFICTION).
VINYL-BAR - from 8pm:
A PARTY CALLED CHA CHA CHA
DJ Ach (Our Latin Thing Vienna) packs Latin Old School, Afro Cuban, Afro Beat and Salsa into his record box.
VIDEO OF THE DAY
Lars Eidinger after the screening of LARS EIDINGER - SEIN ODER NICHT SEIN at Stadtkino im Künstlerhaus.
VIENNALE PODCAST
Sexual healing? With Denis Côté
PRESS
Aus dem Gewohnten ausbrechen und auszucken
US-Regisseurin Elaine May bei der Viennale: Spaß an Extremen
