26 Oct 2022

DAILY: Day 9, October 28, 2022

In our VIENNALE DAILIES you'll find everything you need to know about what's happening around the festival!

QUOTE OF THE DAY

They have taken pigs and monkeys to space, but never a poet.

(Werner Herzog - read the full Interview HERE)

NEED SOME FILMTIPS? HERE ARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS:

FUMER FAIT TOUSSER
R: Quentin Dupieux
FR, 28.10. 11.15 pm: GARTENBAUKINO
MO, 31.10. 4.30 pm: URANIA
SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING: French weirdo-comedy director Quentin Dupieux enjoys such platitudes as the title of his latest feature because they serve his whimsical sense of humour well. In this new film, he has a troupe of wannabe – and wildly anti-nicotine – superhero avengers called “Tobacco Force” embark on a semi-adventurous journey that feels like a deliberately impoverished version of a Marvel blockbuster. A crew of five, the Force uses the negative energy of tobacco to fight the monsters they encounter, thereby – naturally – saving the world. But this film is more about the delirious detours of storytelling than it is about any cohesive plotline. Cast with Dupieux regulars like Alain Chabat and Benoît Poelvoorde, this surrealistic retro pop-farce navigates the twilight zones of cheap sixties sci-fi shows and the gory labyrinths of the anthology horror genre. The film features foam turtles, talking fish, rubber suits, thinking helmets and hilariously endless (or rather endlessly hilarious?) conversations. Various opportunities for faux-philosophizing arise from a sort of teambuilding seminar. The laconic jokes served up by Dupieux are reckless and unpredictable. (Stefan Grissemann)

TRENQUE LAUQUEN - TEIL 1 & TEIL 2
R: Laura Citarella
FR, 28.10. 3.00 pm: STADTKINO IM KÜNSTLERHAUS
SA, 29.10. 11.00 am: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL
Laura Citarella makes a poignant and whimsical entry into the ranks of New Argentine cinema with her latest, expansively narrated feature TRENQUE LAQUEN. Fans of Argentine directors such as Mariano Llínas and Alejo Moguillansky, who share the film’s screenwriting and editing credits respectively, will recognize the characteristic richly meandering storytelling, which draws on multiple quirky characters and a healthy dose of meta-humor and self-irony. In Part I, Laura (Laura Paredes, who co-wrote the script), the film’s protagonist, goes missing, sending her pragmatic jilted boyfriend and her stone-faced, yet infinitely sensitive co-worker on a quest to find her. Laura is a woman of two-pronged passions: a dedicated plant researcher, she becomes entranced with a story of a highly erotic and tormented love affair between a young female biologist and a married man. TRENQUE LAQUEN I takes viewers on a journey through the eponymous provincial municipality southwest of Buenos Aires, during which ordinary landscapes, understated pitstops and situations are turned into the stations of an engrossing mystery. At its heart lies the human yearning for the extraordinary: an existential discovery plot that could forever change our lives. (Ela Bittencourt)

TENÉIS QUE VENIR A VERLA
R: Jonás Trueba
FR, 28.10. 1.30 pm: URANIA
Jonás Trueba follows his monumental study of Spanish youth, 2021’s WHO’S STOPPING US, with an unexpectedly light seriocomic miniature focusing on a very different but equally specific period in life. Friends who have fallen out of touch with each other meet up at a Chano Domínguez concert in Madrid. After the show, Guillermo (Francesco Carril) and Susana (Irene Escolar) implore their old friends Dani (Vito Sanz) and Elena (Itsaso Arana) to come visit them at their place in the country. After a six-month interval, they make the trip. YOU HAVE TO COME AND SEE IT examines the moment when youthful restlessness and discovery begin settling into the social regimes of middle age. In just over an hour, Trueba shows the friends exploring the house, having dinner, discussing the work of philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, taking a walk and playing a fierce game of table tennis. Seemingly inspired by the semi-improvisational films of Hong Sangsoo and the reflexivity of Abbas Kiarostami, Trueba allows an ordinary day to unfold without manufactured drama. People who have made different choices in their lives simply reflect on the journey that has brought them to this moment of relative peace. (Michael Sicinski)

Image of movie Salamone, Pampa (Photographie und jenseits – Teil 34)

SALAMONE, PAMPA
(PHOTOGRAPHIE UND JENSEITS – TEIL 34)
R: Heinz Emigholz
FR, 28.10. 11.00 am: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL
Conceived in tandem with his essayistic SLAUGHTERHOUSES OF MODERNITY, also premiered at this year’s Viennale, the prolific Heinz Emigholz travelled to Argentina to document 25 buildings by the local architect Francisco Salamone (1897–1959) for his ongoing series “Architecture as Autobiography” and “Photography and beyond”. In the 1930s, Salamone was given carte blanche by the government to design slaughterhouses, schools, town halls, squares and cemetery gates in a dozen of small cities scattered throughout the vast Buenos Aires province.
Controversial at the time, although now declared national historical monuments, Salamone’s idiosyncratic and eerie buildings stood out for their art deco ambitions amongst the desolated and underdeveloped landscape of rural Argentina. Ankle deep in the pampa húmeda, the immense flat and humid grassland that covers most of the central region of the country, Emigholz follows the evolution of Salamone to create a tour de force of monumentality and decay. An architectural road movie of sorts, SALAMONE, PAMPA traces not only the remains of a cult architect but, more importantly, the extinguished idea of a country. (Pablo Marín)

Image of movie When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories

WHEN THERE IS NO MORE MUSIC TO WRITE,
AND OTHER ROMAN STORIES
R: Eric Baudelaire
FR, 28.10. 8.30 pm: FILMMUSEUM
Éric Baudelaire’s latest featurette is comprised of two short films and the longer titular work, a documentary about experimental composer Alvin Curran. It is structured around an extended interview with Curran, in which we learn about his post-Cagean philosophy of collective improvisation, and in particular how he sees it as an aesthetic model for a more just, egalitarian society. In his work with the Rome-based group Musica Elettronica Viva, Curran attempted to do away even with the idea of a discrete work with a starting or stopping point. The two short films preceding WHEN THERE IS NO MORE MUSIC serve as object lessons, clarifying Curran’s ideas about the relationship between aesthetic and political radicalism. FOUR FLAT TIRES is a complex collage of audio and visual material that conveys a humanistic footnote to the Red Brigade’s kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro. In trying to avoid harming a civilian, the terrorists gave themselves a conundrum, one having to do with an intricate mapping of the Roman cityscape. THE LOST SCORE, meanwhile, combines scenes from ZABRISKIE POINT with fragments of music Curran and MEV wrote for the film, a score that was never used. Time and geography again combine to generate a political articulation of abstract space. (Michael Sicinski)