Festival Archive Trailer

AWAKENING by Joanna Hogg, UK/Austria 2025 

From outside, the world seeps into the ear, threatening with all its possibilities, live and in color. So better to turn around once more, close your eyes, and keep on dreaming. Yet reality is harsher: Pull yourself together! Open the window! That window which grants surprising insights from astonishing perspectives, and which also opens in the cinema, that place of unexpected answers to unasked questions. With precision and perfection, Joanna Hogg shapes that threshold moment of unrest and resistance, followed by the realization that nothing better could possibly have come to mind in order – finally! – to move and to act.

"We are impressed by this small film from a great author, which demonstrates the inexhaustible power of renewal that lies within cinema," says Viennale director Eva Sangiorgi. "Joanna Hogg dares something new and, with a profoundly personal and political gesture, puts herself on the line."

 

A film by Radu Jude (Romania/Austria 2024, 2 min)

In a small event hall, a woman in traditional costume begins playing a melody on a tambal (hammered dulcimer). The quirky, clever and shrewd greeting that Radu Jude is sending us from his homeland to Vienna soon becomes clear. It is the Tritsch-Tratsch Polka by Johann Strauss, which the folk musician Nicoleta Tudorache, who is famous in Romania, performs with verve – and which has certainly never been heard in this rendition. But what is the intellectual joker Radu Jude, who never shies away from a satirical jab, up to? Is it appreciation? A joke? An allusion to the debates on cultural appropriation?

“This instrument is usually associated with the Roma minority,” the filmmaker explains, “and I’m delighted to show how Johann Strauss sounds when played on it. I’ve seen a stiff, immaculately dressed audience in a Vienna concert hall take in a classical orchestra rendition of this piece, and since cinema is still a popular form of art, I prefer to have Mrs. Tudorache playing it on a țambal. It’s certainly livelier and more fun.”

“Radu Jude is one of Europe’s most surprising contemporary directors,” said the Viennale director Eva Sangiorgi. “It means a lot to me that he accepted our invitation to create the trailer for the 62nd Viennale. In this election year it makes sense to deal with concepts of nationality and cultural property. And so, this playful yet clever short film invites political reflection, while at the same time challenging any intellectual pomposity. In the lead up to the Strauss year 2025, in which the 200th anniversary of the birth of the iconic Austrian composer will be celebrated extensively, I celebrate this de-sanctifying invitation to cultural appropriation – this time, in a reverse plundering movement, of a symbol of western music culture.”

 

Pedro Costa

(Portugal/Austria 2023, 2 min)

A swan song against the backdrop of a fiery apocalypse? Or is it merely the full moon in the dramatically cloudy night sky that illuminates the singer’s head as if with a gloriole? Dark it is and dark is the song she sings to us – of the melancholy evenings, of the intolerability of misery, of how quickly life is discarded; but mainly that it doesn’t have to be like this! The libretto is by Bertolt Brecht, the melody by Hanns Eisler, the voice belongs to Elizabeth Pinard, the form was conceived by Pedro Costa. And the shudder that runs through the body is ours alone.

“Pedro Costa is a tirelessly exploratory filmmaker. This short work, which is our festival trailer this year, represents both a political gesture and an aesthetic experiment – and could perhaps one day become part of one of his future works,” says Viennale director Eva Sangiorgi. “It’s an enduringly impressive film that bears witness to the continuous transformative power of cinema."

 

In celebration of its 60th edition, the Viennale has asked six filmmaker friends, representing different positions of contemporary cinema, to create festival trailers. Their short works differ in tonality as well as emotion, but they all speak of cinema, its history and the world around us.

 

VIENNALE-TRAILER 2022: LE SOLDAT - CLAIRE DENIS

France/Austria 2022, 1 minute

Who appears when we see ourselves in the mirror, make ourselves visible? What inner experience do we hide from others? In a double hand gesture, Claire Denis reminds us at the same time of Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) and of the actor Michel Subor (1935-2022), who played in four of her films and with whom Denis also remained closely connected in private. Denis juxtaposes a scene from Godard's Algerian war film LE PETIT SOLDAT (1960/63) with a miniature from her hypnotic work BEAU TRAVAIL, wherein she directly quoted Godard's scene in 1999. Michel Subor starred in both films. Her most recent work STARS AT NOON is dedicated to his memory.

Viennale-Trailer 2022: WALDEN - RYUSUKE HAMAGUCHI

Japan/Austria 2022, 2 minutes

What else is there to be expected from Hamaguchi, who in 2021 alone made the two fantastically tender films WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY and DRIVE MY CAR. If he can keep us in suspense for three quiet hours, he can also decelerate our pulse in two minutes. He just points the camera at it: water, waves, reflections of branches, sounds of forest life, a pure impressionistic work of pausing. And suddenly, in this meditative world that you sink into, a few wise female sentences from a bygone cinematic era sound and immediately feel very close - that's all the sky allows.

 

Viennale-Trailer 2022: SONGS FROM NAPLES - NARCISA HIRSCH

Argentina/Austria 2022, 1 minute

"Red lips should be kissed," Cliff Richard once sang, and that's probably the first association that comes to mind when confronted with the pursed red female lips that 94-year-old German-Argentine experimental filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch presents in close-up in SONGS FROM NAPLES. But then the red woman's mouth bites gleefully into a piece of raw liver with its dazzling white teeth, taking on something thoroughly predatory. Hirsch, who has repeatedly devoted herself to the themes of women, the body and sexuality in her films, here returns to a motif (and the 16mm material) from her 1971 film CANCIONES NAPOLITANAS.

VIENNALE-TRAILER 2022: INDEPENDENCE DAY - SERGEI LOZNITSA

Niederlande/Österreich 2022, 1 Minute

In the present context, the titular INDEPENDENCE DAY is anything but just another marker in the annals of history. Rather, such actually and concretely and very tangibly symbolizes the freedom of the democratically organized world in distress. Loznitsa, a tireless worker in archives and historical sites, is a virtuoso of actualization. Whether he is updating the archival or showing the archival context to the archival, we feel that it concerns us. That gesture that establishes the connection between the private and the political. A cinematic haiku that could also be a trailer.

Viennale-Trailer 2022: THE LIONESS - NINA MENKES

US/Austria 2022, 2 minutes

A young lady looks past us and the eye of the camera. Tension piles up. A troupe of dancers in sequined costumes just before the big performance, bustling. (Sacred) cows and wild monkeys roaming in a monstrous temple complex carved into the rocks, images of majestic tranquility flowing through. Two lionesses behind bars, a brief thought of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "The Panther." A circus performer with four hula hoops at once in glittering garb. On the soundtrack, the world calls out to us that there is an incredible amount to discover in it. Now! Wide awake sensual impressions, one after the other like the blink of an eye, are after all the most beautiful experiences that cinema has to offer.

VIENNALE-TRAILER 2022: VIENNA WALTZ - ALBERT SERRA

Spain/Austria, 2 minutes

A heavily puffing fighting bull, a potency concentrate, moves as in an arena, irritated and ready to attack at the same time; however, he seems to turn his attention rather in a shadowy forest sometimes here, sometimes there. And instead of the opposing torero, a conspecific emerges, one could also say he overlaps with himself, equally irritated. The words "Sex", "Death", "Blood", "Bye" peel out one after the other from the black-green shimmer. One potency turns away, the other dallies indecisively in the face of danger. Cinema is a space of possibilities, often seducing us with its beauty. But it is about the fundamental - and about the consequence of the decision.

BUT WHY? by Terence Davies

The trailer for the 59th edition of the Viennale is by British filmmaker Terence Davies, to whom a monography is also dedicated this year.
BUT WHY? is a film that condenses in little more than one minute his poetics, which are marked by profound humanity, and that succeeds in making the viewer merge into an atmosphere of light and (Davies’ own) words. An elegy to time and life.

AD UNA MELA by Alice Rohrwacher

We owe this V'20 trailer to one of the great contemporary women filmmakers, Alice Rohrwacher. Shot on 16 mm film, it plays with the mystery of creation and the magic of light and shadow from which cinema is born. It’s an invocation to the return to innocence, which is the prerequisite for every new discovery, the driving force behind the eternal cycle of life. An excerpt from Pablo Neruda’s poem “Oda a la manzana” (“Ode to the Apple”), performed by the author himself, at the same time praises the film, the precious moment of a rediscovery and a new creation:

Cuando mordemos
tu redonda inocencia
volvemos
por un instante
a ser
también recién creadas criaturas
aún tenemos algo de manzana.

“When we bite into
your round innocence
we too regress
for a moment
to the state
of the newborn:
there is still some apple in us all.”

 

Lucrecia Martel: AI

In his autobiography, the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden warns that “the greatest danger still lies ahead, with the refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities, such as facial and pattern recognition”. Lucrecia Martel mimics a typical automated process of pattern recognition in her trailer for the Viennale – but renders it strange, surreal and disquieting. What central piece of “found footage” does she hurl against this machine? It is the famous “Psychiatric Interview” with an anonymous “Patient no. 18” filmed at UCLA in 1961, today viewed by 85 million people on YouTube. A young man (whose subsequent fate remains a secret) speaks deliberately and thoughtfully about his desire to “play the piano for people”; he is duly classified as a case of “negativism in a catatonic schizophrenic”. Martel combines the man and his interviewer, loops eye movement and blurs mouth movement; she introduces flashes of other, associative images and underscores everything with an ever-changing collage of musical selections that sits on the edge of our aural comprehension. The will of AI to control, sort, and label everyone in the world is countered by a sublime act of audiovisual subversion. (Adrian Martin)

AI
Lucrecia Martel, Argentinien/A, 2019, 2 min, eOF

Sound: Tritón Sonido (Manuel de Andrés, Guido Berenblum, Gerardo Kalmar)
Postproduction: Sebastián Toro
VFX: Julian Stirparo
Production:  Rei Cine (Benjamin Domenech)
World Sales: sixpackfilm
World Rights: Viennale

 

Lav Diaz: THE BOY WHO CHOSE THE EARTH

The Viennale is pleased to announce that this year’s trailer was created by the multiple award-winning Filipino director Lav Diaz. Many of his films, outstanding also due to their length, have been shown at previous Viennale festivals. In 2014 he won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival and two years ago the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for THE WOMAN WHO LEFT.

In his trailer for the Viennale, THE BOY WHO CHOSE THE EARTH, Lav Diaz tells the story of a boy who has aspirations – he educates himself and forges plans. One day there’s a knock on the door, someone leaves and he is literally left out in the rain. Thunder cracks and lightning flashes, water pelts down and engulfs everything. Incredulously, the boy looks up to the heavens – is this supposed to be his destiny? THE BOY WHO CHOSE THE EARTH is probably the shortest film Lav Diaz has ever made – a grain rich in meaning.

“Each year, the Viennale invites great directors to enliven the brief moment preceding the film screenings. Thus the Viennale trailer represents a kind of rite of passage, leading us from the real world into the world of cinema, where everything is true, but condensed,” says Viennale director Eva Sangiorgi. “Lav Diaz is one of the great masters of contemporary cinema. His cinematic vision, his rhythm and his timing are unique and original. With his films, Diaz retraces the history of his country from the experience of an individual and thus takes it to a universal level. We celebrate the political and aesthetic power of this great little film that reveals itself in this special view of the world, illustrating its beauty and denouncing its calamity at the same time.”

THE BOY WHO CHOSE THE EARTH
Lav Diaz, PH/A 2018

 

 

Abel Ferrara: HANS 

In July of this year, Hans Hurch travelled to Rome to meet Abel Ferrara and discuss the terms and content for a potential Viennale trailer with him. Following Hurch’s unexpected death, Ferrara conceived the trailer as an obituary: We see a landscape at dusk and hear music and children crying in the distance. The face of the late Viennale director is superimposed, his first name pronounced by an electronically distorted voice that can hardly be understood. Captured in an extremely aesthetic manner, a photo of Bob Dylan in his youth and an emblematic image of John Ford with a black patch over his eye are rolling past.

Abel Ferrara’s trailer is a phantasmagoria, a visual game of deception, combining some of the things that were important to Hans Hurch with dream-like sequences and celebrating a moment of utmost existential compression.

In his accompanying note, Ferrara wrote: “A small thank you to someone who constantly and consistently maintained the dream of the eternal cinema.”

HANS
Abel Ferrara (A/I 2017, 1'27")

 

Klaus Wyborny: CINÉMA VÉRITÉ

In 2010, Klaus Wyborny filmed the world premiere of his cinematic work STUDIEN ZUM UNTERGANG DES ABENDLANDES (STUDIES FOR THE DECAY OF THE WEST), 2010 in Vienna’s (meanwhile closed) Stadtkino at Schwarzenbergplatz. He liked the images from the dark movie theater, only partly lit by the film, so much that he did the same at later screenings, presented between Portugal and the United States, in order to weave these images into a fabric of places and times – into a vision of cinema gliding over continents through the light of the projector.What’s celebrated here is a practice that has to be defended for its inherent democratic spirit.

In CINÉMA VÉRITÉ, Wyborny has now condensed this cinematic utopia into trailer length, to manifesto density. Cinema, as Wyborny understands it and as the Viennale practices it, is a constant departure into reality.

CINÉMA VÉRITÉ
Klaus Wyborny (D/A 2016)
Director, camera, editor, sound: Klaus Wyborny

 

 

Tsai Ming-liang: XIAO KANG

This year, the Viennale has once again succeeded in garnering a great director of world cinema for the creation of the traditional festival trailer. At the Viennale’s invitation, the Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang, known through works such as REBELS OF THE NEON GOD, THE RIVER, THE HOLE and WAYWARD CLOUD, created a short, approximately two-minute homage to Lee Kang-sheng – the actor who has appeared in almost all of Tsai Ming-liang’s films over the past thirty years and significantly influenced his entire oeuvre.

The film XIAO KANG shows Lee Kang-sheng roaming through a bamboo forest in a succession of simultaneously mysterious and unintentional movements. These again are alienated by the projection of silent black-and-white footage, accompanied only by the sound of a projector. It’s a fine, minimalist work, oscillating between dream and memory and kept entirely in the style of Tsai Ming-liang’s great films.

“More and more often, these short films initiated by the Viennale, such as the works by Stan Brakhage, Jean-Luc Godard and, most recently, Manoel de Oliveira, turn into mysterious, highly personal cinematic poems about time and memory,” says Viennale director Hans Hurch. “They are cinematographic haiku in the large flow of current images and sounds.”

XIAO KANG
by Tsai Ming-Liang
Taiwan/A 2015

 

 

Manoel de Oliveira: CHAFARIZ DAS VIRTUDES

This year's trailer of the Viennale, the 21st since 1995, was made by the Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira.
Oliveira is at the age of 105 years not only the probably oldest filmmaker who is still active, but also one of the big masters in the history of cinema.
His first film DOURO, FAINA FLUVIAL originated in 1931 - his last up to now, the short O VELHO DO RESTELO was shot this summer. 83 years are between those two movies...

The trailer of the Viennale derives from the invitation of the festival to the filmmaker. It has originated in the connection and during the work on his new 20-minute film O VELHO TH RESTELO which had his world premiere a few weeks ago at the film festival of Venice. In this film, a series of free associative fantasies about literature, history and the figure of the Don Quijote, a water-spouting fountain is to be seen for some moments, a setting which resolves in a cross-fade to sea waves, whilethe voice of the narrator is to be heard.

For his trailer, Oliveira has chosen the same setting. It shows a baroque wall fountain in the Portuguese town of Porto, which is called „Chafariz das Virtudes“ i.e. „The fountain of virtues“. Porto is the very town in the north of Portugal in which Manoel de Oliveira was born and has been growing up and which is still today a central reference point of the artist. The fountain, which was dried-out for many years, was brought back to life again especially for this film.

Unlike in O VELHO DO RESTELO the fountain in the Viennale Trailer stands completely for itself: For the duration of one minute and a single shot, accompanied only by the noise of the flowing water.

„It is“, Viennale director Hans Hurch says, „a pure picture of the passing time, the trickling away of life, of the present and the irretrievably lost at the same time. And it is maybe the most simple and mysterious of all Viennale trailers for me. While watching this strange cinematic haiku, I have to think over and over again about this long, rich life of that old man from Porto who has given us this film.“

CHAFARIZ DAS VIRTUDES
by Manoel de Oliveira
Portugal/Austria 2014

Camera: Renato Berta
Editor: Valérie Loiseleux
Sound: Henri Maikoff

 

SHIRIN NESHAT: ILLUSIONS & MIRRORS

This year’s trailer marks a notable anniversary at the Viennale: it is the 20th “little film” realized by an important filmmaker commissioned by the festival since 1995.

In 2013 the choice has fallen on Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat, world-renowned for her installations and photos. Neshat’s work ILLUSIONS & MIRRORS, circa two minutes long, was created as part of a larger project, a half-feature-length experimental film, which she will be shooting in the coming weeks with the support of Dior. Filmed in her characteristic, radical, mainly black-and-white style, ILLUSIONS & MIRRORS traces the somnambulistic hallucinations of a young woman, played by Natalie Portman. It was shot by cameraman Darius Khondji, most recently responsible for the cinematography of Michael Haneke’s AMOUR. ILLUSIONS & MIRRORS is about the futile attempt of chasing a shadow that wanders through the dunes of an empty beach. When it finally comes to an encounter in a deserted house, the young woman experiences a disturbing surprise.

Shirin Neshat: “This film pays tribute to black/white, silent films made by surrealist filmmakers such as Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel and later the wonderful experimental filmmaker Maya Deren. Thematically it is a big departure for me as it moves away from all my past socio-political subjects regarding Iran and Islam and enters a very timeless and universal story.”

A small film by a great artist, and the first Viennale Trailer to feature a veritable star. Or in Shirin Neshat’s words, “For a moment, I met Hollywood.”

ILLUSIONS & MIRRORS
Shirin Neshat, USA/A 2013
Camera: Darius Khondji
Editor: Nariman Hamed
Music & Sound: Johnny Azari
With: Natalie Portman

World Rights Viennale, Siebensterngasse 2, 1070 Wien, T +43 1 526 59 47
World Sales Sixpack Film, Neubaugasse 45/13, 1070 Wien, T +43 1 526 09 90

CHRIS MARKER: KINO

A short film by Chris Marker about the long history of cinema

Invited by the Viennale, the legendary, 90-year-old, French film essayist Chris Marker some time ago created a one-minute festival trailer, thus following in the footsteps of directors such Agnès Varda, Stan Brakhage, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch, who have done so in the past. The Viennale has chosen Marker’s work as its “anniversary trailer” because in it, Marker – like no other director before him – deals with the history of cinema in a playful and surprising manner. More precisely, he deals with the question of “the perfect viewer” that cinema has been looking for since the father of film, D. W. Griffith. Chris Marker ultimately finds this ideal viewer at the end of his small essay in an unexpected figure.

See for yourself.

CHRIS MARKER - KINO
France/Austria, 2012, 1 minute
35 mm/1.33:1/color
Realization: Chris Marker

 

 

DAVID LYNCH: THE 3RS

The 3 Rs may be a reference to the three basic educational skills Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic; cultural techniques that, as Lynch’s dense school nightmare makes quite clear, are simultaneously techniques of manipulation, restriction and control. The question posed at the beginning regarding the number of stones in Pete’s hands is not trivial. Why two? Why not three? Or 14? In accordance with the Lynchian dissolution of cinematic narratives in an associative tangle of terror, everything that seemed to be linear, firmly established and secure is breaking down. Liberated images liberate thoughts. Or do free thoughts free images? In cinema even a squeaky bathtub duck can bleed if you cut off its head.

DAVID LYNCH: THE 3RS
USA/Austria, 2011, 1 minute
35 mm/1.78:1/color/black-and-white
Realization: David Lynch

APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL: EMPIRE

EMPIRE is a film about searching and finding. As the camera feels its way along the walls of a cave or grotto, we see a diver wearing a gleaming white helmet and a hand diving into the sand to pick up some shells, playfully sliding them through his fingers. The images are accompanied by a polyphonic roaring, hammering and rattling. Has the diver been looking for something and has someone else found it? Possibly. Apichatpong Weerasethakul leaves it up to his viewers’ imagination to fill in the gaps and come up with their own answers. “You need an open mind to discover things,” says the director.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul:  EMPIRE
Thailand/Austria, 2010, 2 minutes
35 mm/1.78:1/color, no dialogue
Realization: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

JAMES BENNING: FIRE & RAIN

“I took the steel rolling process that takes about ten minutes,” James Benning writes about FIRE & RAIN, “and condensed it down to one minute by cutting out portions and hiding the ellipses in time with dissolves.” James Benning takes the melting down process literally as he captures the red-hot metal processed in a Ruhr steel mill. The director does not, however, focus on hard human labor, but on the movement itself as part of a mechanized work process. Like a beam of light, the glowing steel flits across the screen several times before it is extinguished by artificial rain – and both picture and movement dissolve in a cloud of steam.

JAMES BENNING: FIRE & RAIN

USA/Austria, 2009, 1 minute
35mm/1.78:1/color, no dialogue
Realization: James Benning

JEAN-LUC GODARD: UNE CATASTROPHE

Jean-Luc Godard’s art and film-historical mini-assemblage UNE CATASTROPHE takes us from a dramatic moment of Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925) and garishly colored video war images to an extended kissing scene, shot in super slow motion, from the famous Berlin romance PEOPLE ON SUNDAY (1929). On the same note: the groaning of female tennis players serving or returning balls, a Low German love poem (“Dat du min Leevsten büst”) and the beginning of Robert Schumann’s piano cycle “Scenes from Childhood”. Une catastrophe has an air of resignation but is not entirely without hope: Love is reachable, from war, in 63
seconds via a detour of art.

JEAN-LUC GODARD: UNE CATASTROPHE
France, 2008, 1 minute
35mm/1.33:1/color
Realization: Jean-Luc Godard

JEM COHEN: A TALE OF TWO CITIES

In A TALE OF TWO CITIES, Jem Cohen, who for more than twenty years has been building a steadily growing archive of various city views, street scenes and portraits, has connected images from his hometown of New York and of Vienna. Increasingly, the obvious and well-known differences in the architecture and streets are neutralized; the locations – an empty stairwell here, a busy street there – exchange shape and quality. The most irritating images are those of white, lifeless faces: filmed in the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Vienna, the dead eyes of Vienna stare back, as silent witnesses, at the viewer.

JEM COHEN: A TALE OF TWO CITIES

USA/Austria, 2007, 1 minute
35 mm/1,33:1/black-and-white, no dialogue
Realization: Jem Cohen
Music: Andy Moor

LEOS CARAX: MY LAST MINUTE 

A director lighting a cigarette, a candle-lit room, and a work place in front of a computer screen. The words “tonight, I stop smoking” can be made out on the monitor. An ironic final ceremony for a vice that has long accompanied one? The pan to the drawer, which holds a revolver, instantly extends the situation to a far more comprehensive act of annihilation. A shot rents the course of events. This is not an effect of the story, but the experience of death as a radical subjective means of withdrawal. A sensation characteristic of this turbulent world that Carax explores in his films.

LEOS CARAX: MY LAST MINUTE

France/Austria, 2006, 1 minute
35mm/1.37:1/color
Concept: Leos Carax
Editing: Laure Gardette
Sound: Hervé Guyader
Sound mix: Emmanuel Croset
Producers: Albert Prévost, Olivier Jacob

KEN JACOBS: INCENDIARY CINEMA

The image on the screen flickers unsteadily; the rhythm is unsettling: black/white, black/white, white/black. The film cuts abruptly to a playground. Color appears, sound sets in. Children crawl in the sand, adults watch over them, sitting on benches. It turns abstract. At the end a circle appears on the screen, again flickering strongly, like a beating heart. This is “Incendiary Cinema.” There is no such thing as a nice succession of images; the film is supposed to distress and disturb, and it also aims to create receptivity for images and viewing. It is a small, quite salutary shot before the main film.

KEN JACOBS: INCENDIARY CINEMA

USA/Austria, 2005, 1 minute
35 mm/1.37:1/color and black-and-white
Concept and realization: Ken Jacobs
Line editing: Nisi Jacobs

AGNÈS VARDA: VIENNALE WALZER

An exhaustive, deceptively simple essay on the complex relationship between cinema and the real world in one-and-a-half minutes. Colorful spinning tops rotate on a reflecting surface, the sounds of a merry-go-round give way to familiar music. The camera pans upwards, revealing Agnès Varda’s motionless face. From off-screen, her thoughts contradict the sounds of Strauss: “Ah no, not those Viennese waltzes … I’m thinking about film, about what happens every day. I’m thinking about bread, salt, earth, corn, bread, the sea, salt.” What follows are images (and sounds) of these essential things, a brief digression, with a musical transition between one take and the next, where there is time to take a closer look at things.

AGNÈS VARDA: VIENNALE WALZER

France/Austria, 2004, 2 minutes
35mm/1.66:1/color
Concept and realization: Agnès Varda

ERNIE GEHR: CARTE DE VISITE

Drifting clouds. They are not nice little clouds that invite us to interpret them symbolically; rather they are poisonous and unhealthy clusters, a skin rash of the sky, an impenetrable gray curtain of smog. This is a trailer of impressive tranquility and simplicity. A second look, however, opens up new dimensions: Are there not – as so often the case in Gehr’s work – unsuspected, amorphous forms that manifest themselves? Has an event scurried quickly past us while we were still busy discovering the mysterious in the seemingly obvious? In fact, these are two trailers in one: a palimpsest of the cinematographic pleasure of mystification.

ERNIE GEHR: CARTE DE VISITE

USA/Austria, 2003, 1 minute
35mm/1.66:1/color
Concept and realization: Ernie Gehr

STAN BRAKHAGE: SB

Fifty seconds is all Stan Brakhage needs to challenge the power of the images we see. Without sound and handpainted. A dance of colors, forms and flaws at a speed that seems to mock the lyrical effect of the result. Laconically entitled SB, the film is part of a series of handpainted movies that Brakhage has repeatedly chosen as specific material for processing. It is a silent, colorful piece of pure rhythm. In the din of grand, extravagant cinema, this small cinematic haiku is a special gift from the great filmmaker Stan Brakhage.

STAN BRAKHAGE: SB

USA/Austria, 2002, 1 minute
35mm/1.66:1/color
Concept and realization: Stan Brakhage

JONAS MEKAS: VIENNA & MOZART, ELVIS

VIENNA & MOZART

On July 19, 1944, my brother Adolfas and I boarded a train that was to take us to Vienna. Instead, we ended up in a forced labor camp near Hamburg. In 1971, the Soviets permitted me to visit my mother in Lithuania. After visiting her, I decided to travel to Vienna. It was a very important moment in my life when I finally arrived in Vienna. There I met my new friends Peter Kubelka, Hermann Nitsch and Arnulf Rainer. During this journey in August 1971, I shot this footage. I kept it, waiting for the right moment to release it. I’m not in any hurry with my films. Then I received a message from Hans Hurch: Can you send us a trailer? And I thought, now I can finally show my Vienna film. (Jonas Mekas)

JONAS MEKAS: WIEN & MOZART

USA/Austria, 2001, 1 minute
35mm/1.66:1/color
Concept and realization:
Jonas Mekas

ELVIS

I was lucky enough to see Elvis Presley’s final concert at Madison Square Garden in June 1972. Usually, you are not allowed to bring a camera to a concert. But the audience and the entire event were so wild that no one paid any attention to me. Over the years I watched the footage again and again. Then the Viennale called and I immediately thought of my Elvis material. The only problem was that I didn’t know what kind of musical soundtrack to use. I tried everything and was close to giving up when I happened to hear a Viennese waltz on the radio. That was it! What could be better – or funnier – than Elvis and Strauss? (Jonas Mekas)

JONAS MEKAS: ELVIS

USA/Austria, 2001, 1 minute
35mm/1.37:1/color
Concept and realization: Jonas Mekas

 

MATTHIAS MÜLLER: BREEZE

A one-minute film as a lyrical condensate of 105 years of cinema. Sixty seconds of enchanting associations related to barefooted duchesses and red fairy-tale shoes, cat people and drama queens: an actress, whose moving black-and-white photograph becomes crinkled like drying paper, draws the curtain again, thus escaping the looks of those reaching for and imposing on her, threatening to destroy her with their lust. Withdrawal will be followed by abandonment, self-denial by staging. Cinema, viewed from a distance and yet so close and present: a memo book about the eerie eroticism of overwhelming cinematic possibilities.

MATTHIAS MÜLLER: BREEZE

Germany/Austria, 2000, 1 minute
35mm/1.66:1/color
Concept, cinematography and realization: Matthias Müller
Editing: Tom Mayer
Music: Achnbach

PETER TSCHERKASSKY: GET READY

A revision of found feature-film footage, this short film needs less than 60 seconds to prove that cinema is an excellent medium for both idleness and rage. From an artistically composed idyllic scene at the seaside, Tscherkassky moves on to a nocturnal ghost ride along a busy road through flickering black-and-white shifts. The subsequent decline is accompanied by an increase in speed. A moving image thrown off track sets the female protagonist and her car in motion. There is life beyond the mainstream: the radical movement of objects, bodies and senses illustrates the power of cinema.

PETER TSCHERKASSKY: GET READY

Austria, 1999, 1 minute
35 mm/1.66:1/black-and-white
Concept and realization: Peter Tscherkassky
Music: Kiawasch Saheb-Nassagh

BRUCE BAILLIE: PIETÀ

Three images, three colorful longer takes: the black silhouettes of playing children, a dense swarm of birds and a mother breast-feeding her baby, all shot at the last light of day. PIETÀ is a cinematic haiku, whose wonderful and at the same time everyday images seemingly aim to express pure love of life and the world, while bathing everything in a deeply melancholic mood. Baillie’s images may easily appear cliché-ridden to us. Yet it is especially the naivety and vulnerability of such visual emblems that raises silent hope that they are (not only as spots) still possible in cinema today.

BRUCE BAILLIE: PIETÀ

USA/Austria, 1998, 1 minute
Super VHS (transferred to 35mm)/
1.66:1/color
Direction, cinematography, editing:
Bruce Baillie
Music: Gustav Mahler

MARTIN ARNOLD: PSYCHO

Martin Arnold has adopted a fragment from the shower scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary thriller PSYCHO, rendering and composing it anew with the possibilities of digital retouching. The result is a short yet intense piece of contemporary aesthetics. Devoted mainly to density and omission, it visualizes the cinematic narrative on all its levels as a cinematographic and aesthetic mise en scène. Simultaneously, it reveals that a resolving adaptation of traditional cinematic forms can also create suspense, excitement and pleasure.

MARTIN ARNOLD: PSYCHO

Austria, 1997, 1 minute
35 mm/1.66:1/black-and-white
Concept, editing and realization: Martin Arnold

GUSTAV DEUTSCH: FILM IST MEHR ALS FILM

24 terms associated with cinema as a feast for the ears and eyes, 24 two-second takes as minimal films about audio-visual art. You read “Memory” while an orchestra performs an emotionally charged abbreviation, representing all the flash-backs in the history of cinema. You read “Propaganda” to a short, war-like drum-roll. And as the insert “Language” appears, an unknown voice postulates, quite correctly, “Godard.” Cinema is the time between two blinks of the eye. A promotional film, perhaps, but one that leaves behind its advertising objective. In a few seconds it puts thousands of aspects of the audiovisual passion for film in a nutshell: a condensed form of cinephilia.

GUSTAV DEUTSCH: FILM IST MEHR ALS FILM

Austria, 1996, 1 minute
35 mm/1.66:1/color
Idea and realization: Gustav Deutsch

GUSTAV DEUTSCH: FILM SPRICHT VIELE SPRACHEN

Using 21 out of 39 fragments of an Indian feature film with French and Arabic subtitles, Deutsch has constructed a new, one-minute story. There has been no technical correction of the found footage; we see it as a cinematic object with all its damage and dirt, in its entire width with optical soundtrack and perforation. The story of the objet trouvé becomes a symbol of the cinematographic cosmos. Gustav Deutsch’s work can be understood as a reminiscence of and homage to the history of film and cinema – under special consideration of the country with the world’s largest film production.

GUSTAV DEUTSCH: FILM SPRICHT VIELE SPRACHEN

Austria, 1995, 1 minute
35 mm/1.66:1/color
Montage: Gustav Deutsch