| Viennale

V'25 Poster Subjects

This year’s Viennale poster subject is as fascinating as it is disturbing. Its motif comes from a French edition of Physiologus from the 13th century and depicts a fox that is playing dead so it can attract a bird. Each one is prospective prey for the other.

In collective consciousness, the fox is considered cunning and proud, unreliable and always a bit of a victim of its own nature – from Aesop to La Fontaine to Collodi. Throughout the centuries and in various cultures, it has embodied different attitudes; in the Middle Ages the fox’s symbolism took on particularly interesting facets; it is associated negatively, primarily with excessive flattery, duplicity, and elaborate deception.

In our poster subject, however, it’s not entirely clear which is the hunter and which the hunted. The role play is more complex, and it’s precisely in this ambiguity that the appeal lies – the encounter can change the relationship.

The poster subject for the retrospective honors the art and craftsmanship of a great filmmaker using a still from the masterpiece that opens our historic review: LA CHUTE DE LA MAISON USHER (The Fall of the House of Usher) from 1928. It impressively captures the visionary power of Jean Epstein and the technical avant-garde nature of his methods. At the same time, it’s a perfect example of the inspiring impetus that this extraordinarily original master of cinema gave art and literature from the beginning – and also of the unique collaborations that enriched his own artistic creations.

V'24 Poster Subjects

This year the inspiration for our motif comes from the world of nature. It may look like two spreading wings, but it represents a plant, the seaweed delesseria lancifolia. It is something that changes when seen in a different light, in a different context; something that carries the possibility of change, that we can imagine as something else, that is indomitable like an idea. It is an invitation to take a great leap, to never stop imagining a different reality – for us, now.

V'23 Poster Motifs

This year’s Viennale poster subject revolves entirely around the theme of LIGHT. Light makes details visible and tangible, reveals a figure and its form, but at the same time also suggests different interpretations that change the more attentively one views the image. Light penetrates and embraces organic matter, emphasizing its mutability. The source material for this poster subject originally comes from the world of science, of research – which once again shows the beauty that the encounter between technology and living forms can bring to light.

Light, form, research, technology, and life – these are also key concepts for the world of cinema. By bringing all its analytical power to the fore and making its mutability clear, this representation is symbolic of the revelatory potential that underlies the medium of film.

V'22 Poster Motifs

On this year’s Viennale poster we see a stately, roaring feline predator. Various artistic techniques are combined here: The brushwork emphasizes the curvaceous form and suggests agility and power, thus breathing life into it, while the print highlights the lively, iridescent color and refers to the pictorial symbolism of oriental art. It is a depiction from the early 19th century, which has traversed cultures and traditions and still has an extremely mysterious effect today. The original work was created by the greatest master of ukiyo-e art, Katsushika Hokusai, who transported historical and mythical subjects into the modern era by combining woodblock printing and painting, and also influenced 19th-century European artists – from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard to Paul Gauguin.

Hokusai created a dynamic figure full of temperament, reminiscent of the movement that is also expressed in his masterpiece Under the Wave off Kanagawa from his famous Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series. A roaring lion that awakens from its torpor and heralds a festival in which everyone passionately participates – the Viennale, that season of cinema and soul-stirring activity.

Like the shishi (i.e. guardian lion) that is supposed to protect against misfortune, this feline predator is the perfect talisman for a festival of inspiration and encounter; it represents not only the courage of filmmaking presented in cinemas, but also the profound, cultural and social bridge-building that it strives for, and for which a festival history now spanning 60 years stands.

Even today, in 2022, the Viennale holds its ground in a difficult environment and in a challenging time for human civilization, aiming to be a reliable place for exchange and communication.

V'21 Poster Motifs

The subject of the festival poster is a natural landscape. This fascinating and suggestive image makes us long for the re-opening of our geographical and spiritual borders in a time that has disrupted our habits and what we thought was safe. It’s inspired by an illustration from the late 19th century that served didactic purposes and was intended to both describe the world and make it known. Its depiction is therefore based on observation and imagination at the same time. Obviously, “the map is not the territory” – to quote the Polish-American scholar Alfred Korzybski – but precisely for this reason it’s an instrument of expansion, being both reproduction and projection. In it lies its affinity with the cinematographic dispositif that interprets our epoch through the subjectivity of its authors and multiplies these interpretations in the sensibility and experience of the viewers.

A still from Guillaume Cailleau’s LABORAT (2014) introduces the Viennale Retrospective 2021. This film of about twenty minutes is featured in one of the multifaceted programs that constitute this year’s retrospective. They have been put together by programmers whose curatorial practice is characterized by promoting a critical cinema that questions the given conditions. The selections made by these delegates, who in turn have been chosen for their experience and sensitivity, emphasize the challenge that has been the catalyst for the entire cycle: namely, that the subversive power of cinema is still able to influence our view of things, to problematize things, and ultimately even to change them.

The image puts emphasis on the gaze of cinema, the gaze in cinema and its infinite possibilities: it’s a gaze that goes beyond the human dimension. This is one of the themes of this journey, inspired by Amos Vogel. His legacy lives on in all corners and film cultures of the world, and it comes together in the different strands that this retrospective explores and connects. We wanted to create a multi-voiced and collaborative retrospective that through its form alone underscores what other paths toward change and subversion are possible today.

V'20 Sujets

From a biological perspective, fungi belong to the domain of the eukaryotes; they comprise a kingdom distinct from animals and plants, which was not assigned to them until the middle of the last century. Previously, they had long been relegated to the plant kingdom, both traditionally and erroneously. Today, though, we know that they have more things in common with animal organisms.

Fungi live in symbiosis with other animal and plant beings, or they are their parasites, including those of humans. Fungi play a fundamental role in the cycle of nature and in the exchange of nutrients in the environment: they are the originators of decomposition and they transform organic matter. Fungi live in dark environments, a characteristic they have in common with the cinema.

Humans use mushrooms as food, they are used as ferment in the preparation of drinks and food, they are used for disinfection or as biological pesticides. Ancient medical traditions as well as modern naturopathy value mushrooms as remedies, and because of their intoxicating effect they are used in religious rituals as well as in secular contexts as a means of escape from everyday life.

Mushrooms have also always been described in literature and in the visual arts as the key to the gates of perception due to their psychoactive and hallucinogenic properties.

The poster subject of the Viennale 2020 is a cheerful collection of stylized toadstools (Amanita muscaria), which have always been iconographically associated with psychedelic experiences. Just as cinema, with its surprising perspectives, inspires unexpected insights and visions and opens perspectives into new worlds. These aspects of transformation, astonishment and liberation are what we want to evoke with our poster subject. The Viennale’s mushroom, neither animal nor plant, is reminiscent of both, although it stubbornly remains something else – something that can continue to transform itself.

At the same time, this lively, colorful surface – on which the playful combination of representation and form makes a variety of associations possible – brings together many mushrooms, at the necessary distance, but still gathered together as if for a celebration and a meeting.

The leitmotif of transformation and recycling also characterizes our Retrospective, which this year is a collaboration between Viennale, the Austrian Film Museum and the distributor sixpackfilm, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. It is reflected in a still from the groundbreaking trilogy FILM IST (“Film Is”) by Gustav Deutsch, who died last year and who explored the phenomenology of the medium of cinema through the images from other films found in the world’s archives.Cinema is made up of cinematic material, cinematic art is a kaleidoscope directed at the world and the images it creates. Our poster shows a single image that captures their fire.