Criterion Sunday 502: Revanche (2008)

I was impressed by this film so it’s no surprise to read — on doing a little research — that Austrian director Götz Spielmann had been working for some time before he made this (although surprisingly hasn’t really made a big splash since then). He shows a fair bit of control over his subject and the performances, with a steely gaze to his camera that adds an edge to the moral drama playing out on screen, between a (fairly low-level) criminal and a police officer who has, shall we say, caused quite a lot of pain in his life and to whom he finds himself unexpectedly living next door. That particular setup seems a bit far-fetched, as does a relationship with the police officer’s wife, but yet somehow it all seems to make sense in the universe that this thriller plays out in. It’s a world of small towns, close-knit communities, and which even allows for a modicum of hope amongst all the bleakness. It’s a shame that it boils down to essentially a film about two men confronting one another over the women in their lives, but the way it’s handled is excellent.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Götz Spielmann; Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht; Starring Johannes Krisch, Ursula Strauss, Andreas Lust, Irina Potapenko Ирина Потапенко; Length 122 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 30 January 2022.

Global Cinema 10: Austria – L’animale (2018)

Austria is a well developed country with a lot of history but being German-speaking I do wonder if sometimes it’s easily mixed up with its larger neighbour. Still, plenty of excellent directors and actors have come from that country, and it remains a strong filmmaking nation.

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Republic of Austria (Österreich)
population 8,902,600 | capital Vienna (Wien) (1.8m) | largest cities Vienna, Graz (270k), Linz (194k), Salzburg (147k), Innsbruck (125k) | area 83,879 km² | religion Catholicism (57%) | official language German (Deutsch) | major ethnicity Austrian (81%) | currency Euro (€) [EUR] | internet .at

A landlocked Alpine country formed of nine federated states, it is largely mountainous, albeit with some plains in the east. The name is from the Old High German for “eastern realm” and first appeared at the end of the 10th century, probably deriving from Mediæval Latin. It was settled by Celtic tribes, but conquered by the Roman Empire as the kingdom of Noricum. Charlemagne conquered the area in the late-8th century, and it was first defined as a state of its own in 976, when granted to the house of Babenberg. It later became a duchy, then eventually fell under the house of Habsburg in the Middle Ages. The Austrian Empire was founded in 1804, then Austria-Hungary in 1867; when the Archduke was assassinated in 1914 it prompted World War I, at the end of which the Empire was dissolved. German-speaking Austria became a Republic, and briefly annexed to Germany in 1938 until the end of World War II. It has a directly elected President, who selects a Chancellor to head the Federal Government.

The earliest films made in the country were newsreels, with the earliest native productions being erotic short films from 1906. Mainstream production began in 1910, kicking into high gear during the war and after. A number of filmmakers emigrated to the west during the Austria-Hungary years and as the German annexation began to be felt, including Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg early on, then later Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and others. Musical comedies became popular following WW2, but filmmaking had dried up by the 1970s aside from avant garde film production (names like Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka, Valie Export being the most prominent). Contemporary filmmakers have started to come to international prominence, most notably Michael Haneke, but also Jessica Hausner, Barbara Albert, Michael Glawogger, Ulrich Seidl and Nikolaus Geyrhalter, amongst others.

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L’animale (2018)

There’s a certain slightly forced quality to the narrative that you expect from a new filmmaker — the way it sets up parallel storylines between parents and children, the use of the title song to link their stories — but on the whole this is a really tightly-controlled film about repressed small town attitudes and people trying to break out of their learned habits. It’s about a young woman (Sophie Stockinger) who finds she’s attracted to another woman — much to her surprise, perhaps less to the audience — while her father grapples with his own sexuality. It’s all shot in a frontal style with slow movements and a clarity to the image that just sets it slightly apart from reality perhaps, while the acting taps into some of the simmering rage that lurks beneath the surface of many of the characters. I think there’s definitely a director worth watching here, and her film is not a million miles from the work of some of the (particularly excellent) recent Austrian and German language women filmmakers like Valeska Grisebach, Jessica Hausner and Angela Schanelec.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Katharina Mückstein; Cinematographer Michael Schindegger; Starring Sophie Stockinger, Julia Franz Richter, Jack Hofer; Length 93 minutes.
Seen at home (Mubi streaming), London, Sunday 30 December 2018.

Joy (2018)

Because my Global Cinema series will be covering the country of Austria tomorrow, I’ve done a week of German-language cinema by women filmmakers. The most recent release I’m covering is this film I saw at the 2018 London Film Festival, where it won the main prize. It’s very far from a joyful film, despite its title, and is a tough watch, but is available on Netflix (at least in the UK).

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I’m not sure how to feel about this film, but it’s certainly not always an easy watch — there’s no happy ending on offer, despite the title (the name of the central character, played by Joy Anwulika Alphonsus, rather than a particularly defining emotion throughout the film). It’s also not, I would hope, intended to be a film about how it is to be a sex worker but rather presents one particular experience, which is of non-European women (in this case, Nigerian) trafficked into sex work and trapped for a significant chunk of time through mounting debts in a form of slavery. The filmmaker bookends the film with scenes set back in Nigeria, though this is largely an Austrian film from an outsider’s perspective — at least, though, it balances the early scene of juju witchcraft practised in Nigeria with a similarly syncretic religious/pagan folk tradition in the mountains of Austria. It also keeps its focus firmly on the character of Joy, so even when we see well-meaning (white) Austrians trying to help her, it’s clear how ineffectual they are and how impossible it is for Joy to act according to what they consider the self-evidently moral and righteous response. Joy’s story is part of an ingrained and ever-repeating cycle of exploitation and capitalism founded on the inequalities of the world’s economy, so the film recognises all it can do is shine a light on this one immigrant story.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Sudabeh Mortezai; Cinematographer Klemens Hufnagl; Starring Joy Anwulika Alphonsus, Mariam Sanusi; Length 109 minutes.
Seen at Vue West End, London, Tuesday 16 October 2018.

Menschenfrauen (1980)

In my German-language women directors theme week, I’ve been running a strand of secondary reviews each day of films that are a little bit odd and experimental, and this one by Austrian mixed media artist Valie Export. Her work here (which is sometimes credited as 1979 or even 1977) plays with feminist ideas of the era, almost comically at times.

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There’s something very eighties about this stylistically heterogeneous exploration of male chauvinism and the terrible toll it can exact on women. That’s not just because of its Tom Selleck-like moustachioed lothario (Klaus Wildbolz), or the grainy film stock. Maybe it’s because of the many formal ways the Austrian director experiments with presenting her message, or maybe it’s just that I didn’t always love it. There are, however, moments when you wonder if the way it uses all those distancing formal techniques isn’t just a joke at the expense of the earnest male dialecticians of filmmaking who usually do this kind of stuff. In any case, it’s interesting.

CREDITS
Director Valie Export; Writer Peter Weibel; Cinematographers Wolfgang Dickmann and Karl Kases; Starring Klaus Wildbolz, Renée Felden, Maria Martina, Susanne Widl; Length 132 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Saturday 3 June 2017.

Die Geträumten (The Dreamed Ones, 2016)

Another odd independent Austrian filmmaker is Ruth Beckermann, who has been working since the 1970s and whose films have largely been documentaries but like the one below, have played with the edges of dramatisation or with historical subjectivity. She made a sort of travelogue in A Fleeting Passage to the Orient (1999), which I’ve already reviewed on my blog, though this 2016 film was the first exposure I’d had to her work.

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It’s an odd film this one, and its oddness largely lies in its sort of contrapuntal relationship to the documentary genre. Two actors (Anja Plaschg and Laurence Rupp) read letters sent between poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann — two people who shared markedly different experiences of wartime Europe — during their relationship from the late-40s to late-60s. As it opens, in darkness, the faces of the actors are seen reading the texts into microphones and I’d thought it might be a sort of Straub/Huillet type exercise (I suppose there are similarities in that those two French-German filmmakers liked deploying texts in brutally minimalist ways). However, though the essential form doesn’t change, there are all kinds of interruptions to our expectations, not least distancing the words expressed with those exchanged between the actors. It’s hard to really encapsulate, but it’s certainly an interesting experience.

CREDITS
Director Ruth Beckermann; Writers Beckermann and Ina Hartwig (based on letters by Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan); Cinematographer Johannes Hammel; Starring Anja Plaschg, Laurence Rupp; Length 89 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury (Bertha DocHouse), London, Thursday 8 December 2016.

Two Early Films by Jessica Hausner: Lovely Rita (2001) and Hotel (2004)

I’m building up to another entry of my Global Cinema series on Saturday, one which focuses on Austria, and so I’m doing a themed week around German-language films directed by women. One of my favourite Austrian filmmakers has been Jessica Hausner, who probably had her breakthrough with her third feature-length film, Lourdes (2009), a film about a young woman with MS in search of a miracle in the pilgrimage site of the title, and one I saw when it came out in cinemas. However, it was her follow-up Amour Fou (2014) which really captured my attention. I think her most recent film, the English-language Little Joe (2019) which premiered at last year’s London Film Festival, is probably a little underrated as a result of the language, but it maintains a really consistently creepy tone, which her first two films indicate is something she has always been skilful at.

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It’s interesting, after seeing Hausner’s later films, to watch her feature debut and identify some stylistic continuities. There’s a stillness to the way scenes play out, an affectless quality to the acting, and underlying it all, something utterly morbid. Here though there’s an ugly visual texture which may be due to financial constraints but which is completely embraced and even feels right for the story — little tics like the quick zooms and the self-conscious acting which suggest dated and cheesy TV soaps. It makes the way the actions of the title character unfold that much more surprising, even shocking. It’s an interesting debut in any case.

Hausner’s second feature, Hotel (2004), manages to sustain — without anything graphic happening — a creepy atmosphere of dark portent, although the remote hotel setting helps with that, as does the largely still camerawork. Shots recede into darkness and corridors lead out of sight as our heroine is frequently seen disappearing into the frame (somewhat as the poster suggests). It’s all very studied, but it does work quite effectively.

Lovely Rita [classification 15]
Director/Writer Jessica Hausner; Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht; Starring Barbara Osika, Christoph Bauer; Length 79 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Monday 16 May 2016.

Hotel (2004) [classification 12]
Director/Writer Jessica Hausner; Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht; Starring Franziska Weisz, Birgit Minichmayr; Length 83 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Sunday 10 July 2016.

Ein flüchtiger Zug nach dem Orient (A Fleeting Passage to the Orient, 1999)

Following on from my post about Ulrike Ottinger’s Chamisso’s Shadow earlier today, another filmmaker crafting a similar meeting between history and travel is Ruth Beckermann, whose work I discuss today takes the form of a travelogue but again uses historical texts and incidents to structure it, finding a little bit of the past in present actions perhaps, and revealing something of the world as it’s not perhaps frequently seen by the West.

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An essay film with shades of Chantal Akerman I thought, in the way it elegantly constructs its telling of the story of the peripatetic later life travels of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in the 19th century with its own travelogue visions of Egypt. There are lateral tracking shots of markets and bridges across the Nile, among many other sights and sounds of the country, pulled together by a studied narration (available in both German and English). It seems like something that must be very deeply considered, and I confess that I watched it in probably less than the careful scrutiny it deserves, but I very much warmed to the sense of feeling it imparts (presumably somewhat like the Empress would herself have encountered) of peering somehow through the exoticised Othering of Egypt and its people that exists in the West, of getting a glimpse of life in this bustling world city, albeit with a certain distance.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Ruth Beckermann; Cinematographers Nurith Aviv נורית אביב and Sophie Cadet; Length 82 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Thursday 30 January 2020.

Welcome to Sodom (2018)

My week themed around African cinema has focused on films by African filmmakers dealing with their own history, political issues and lives, whether in Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Mali, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad or Mauritania (and, in my previous themed week of Arab-language cinema, in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Tunisia as well). However, when looking at cinema about Africa it’s impossible to avoid Western voices. Even in many of the films that I’ve looked at, most notably La Femme au couteau (1969), the coloniser is an unseen but powerfully abusive presence throughout. Therefore, it’s worth pointing out that this documentary about Ghana is by two Austrian filmmakers, and while the subject may be on an environmental catastrophe largely wrought by Western demand for consumer electronics, it also perhaps betrays a certain way of looking at Africa, which you can also sometimes perceive in films by auteurs like Claire Denis, who frequently deals with Black and African bodies, given her upbringing in colonial Africa, or Bertrand Tavernier in Coup de torchon (1981).

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This documentary is filmed in Agbogbloshie, an area of Ghana’s capital Accra where electronic waste is dumped and recycled by an itinerant community which has sprung up around this former swamp land. There are some rather thin statistics that start and end the film (translated indifferently into English), which hint at Western complicity in this very literally dirty business, but most of what we see is just the tangible sense of this lived reality. The sense I get of what the filmmakers are trying to do is the kind of epic cinema of fallen humanity as in, say, Herzog’s Lektionen in Finsternis (Lessons of Darkness, 1992), for this film really privileges the visuals over any kind of contextualising or historical research. And like Herzog’s film, this Austrian film could also be critiqued for its white European gaze on a treacherous African hellscape, but when dealing with Africa on film the European gaze becomes inevitable to deal with at times.

That the area, nicknamed “Sodom” by its inhabitants, is polluted is evident in every frame, and the many fires which are set to strip valuable copper wiring of their plastic must account for much of the health risks. We also hear from a number of people (I’m not clear if they are the voices of the people themselves, or of actors, as they are overlaid on the soundtrack), but the stories are more than just your standard ones of people living in poverty: these are people who have chosen for various reasons to come here, and who despite the horrific reality of life have found value in living and working there. We hear from a gay Jewish man who has fled his native Liberia and is living on the margins to escape persecution, from a boy who resists the identity he was assigned as birth, and prefers the manual labour of the men in the camp. We see plenty of the women too, many of whom are engaged in cooking for the camp, or transporting packs of water in chilled buckets on their heads, which are used by the men tending the fires to keep themselves and their wires cool.

It’s a very tactile film that goes big on the senses — and there’s some rather catchy hip hop music being produced by inhabitants of the area too, which breaks up the action a little — but don’t expect to learn too much about why this area exists or what’s being done to mitigate its evident environmental dangers. This is a cautionary tale intended to make us think about our own use of consumer electronics and where they ultimately end up.

CREDITS
Directors Christian Krönes and Florian Weigensamer; Writers Roland Schrotthofer and Weigensamer; Cinematographer Christian Kermer; Length 90 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury (Bertha Dochouse), London, Sunday 17 March 2019.

Amour Fou (2014)

This Austrian film, set in the early-19th century, is a curious one. It unfolds in a very deliberately paced way, with a series of largely unmoving tableaux compositions with centred groupings of actors, brightly lit in brightly coloured, meticulously tidy rooms. The line delivery resists any overt melodrama while the actors tend to remain still in the centre of the frame, so outwardly this all suggests the formal rigour of, say, a Straub/Huillet film. One might easily assume that nothing happens — as a story about a real life love affair with a tragic denouement, there’s very little of the kind of hand-wringing content you might expect. (I’d go so far as to say this represents some canny anti-Valentine’s Day programming, coming out so soon before that particular festival.) But between the married Henriette Vogel (Birte Schnöink) and the doomy romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist (Christian Friedel), the film conveys plenty of emotion, through its focus on the minutiae of the exchanges between them. Meanwhile there are vast changes taking place in the very social fabric of everyday existence, as the effects of the French Revolution filter through, and Henriette’s husband is tasked with levying taxes on the now newly-emancipated populace of the Austrian empire (much to the chagrin of the aristocracy, one of whom is seen bewailing this invidious novelty). What particularly sets the film apart, though, is its wry take on the figure of Kleist, a self-involved fantasist so wrapped up in his own death-fixated romantic ideals that he seems uncomprehending that the women he meets should not want to join him in death’s loving embrace. He’s a figure more of laughable pretension, and it’s Henriette who seems the more clear-minded despite her terminal diagnosis. As a period costume drama, it certainly bucks the usual dramatic signifiers, but emerges no less clear-sighted for all that.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Jessica Hausner; Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht; Starring Birte Schnöink, Christian Friedel; Length 96 minutes.
Seen at ICA, London, Tuesday 10 February 2015.