The Viennale’s Film Histories
Once again, the Austrian festival provided riveting trips to the past.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I have a fondness for film festivals that do proper retrospectives, especially when they’re a bit off the beaten track and can offer something new to even the most ardent cinephiles (Thierry Frémaux once described a surefire way of knowing a film screened at the Festival Lumière truly was obscure or underseen: Bertrand Tavernier – a man who could give Martin Scorsese a run for his money in terms of encyclopedic movie knowledge – hadn’t seen it yet).
The Viennale does a very good job in that sense, and it’s one of the main reasons I’ve enjoyed attending the festival every year since 2020. This year’s edition, number 62, which ran October 17-29, was no exception, thanks to the clear vision of artistic director Eva Sangiorgi and her skillful collaboration with her curatorial partners, including two of Vienna’s major cultural institutions: the Austrian Film Museum and Filmarchiv Austria, both of which actively contribute to some of the programs and (re)run them after the festival is over, throughout the month of November.
The main Retrospective (housed at the Film Museum) revolved around the works of Robert Kramer, a quintessential name in American political cinema even after he relocated to Europe in 1979 (not surprisingly, many of the prints came from the Cinémathèque Française in Paris). His films are very much products of their time, and yet endowed with an urgency that makes them relevant still today. The feeling of a bygone era was accentuated during the opening screening: 1975’s Milestones was shown on 16mm, which required a short break for reel changes since the venue has only one projector for that format.
On the Filmarchiv end, Florian Widegger put together a program devoted to Austrian actress Helene Thimig, as part of the festival’s Kinematografie strand. The series was called Out of the Spotlight, reflecting the nature of Thimig’s film career: while she was a huge star on stage, her screen roles were frequently minor and at times not even mentioned in the credits. And yet, as the audience could see in the five films chosen for the Viennale (with more to be screened at Metro Kino this month), her presence always added something special to the projects’ flavor.
The other Kinematografie program came courtesy of Dutch programmer Gerwin Tamsma, an expert on Korean cinema. In collaboration with the Korean Film Archive, he brought to Vienna an exploration of the country’s reaction to the Japanese colonial era, through a series of films dealing with that time period or made during it. Most impressive was the breadth of genres through whose prism the filmmakers tackled the issue, including the sheer terror of Epitaph, a triptych of wartime ghost stories first released in 2007. For those who couldn’t attend the festival, some of the films are available, with subtitles, on the Korean Film Archive’s official YouTube channel (an excellent resource for anyone wishing to expand their horizons when it comes to the country’s cinematic output).
The Monografie strand offered two different visions of contemporary cinema: on the one hand, the Colectivo Los Ingrávidos – already the subject of a Focus in Rotterdam earlier this year – seeks to create a film aesthetic far removed from the norm of established Mexican filmmaking, opting for a concept they call “shamanic materialism”; on the other, Brazilian director Juliana Rojas invites the viewer on a journey to a land on the border between our world and a more ghostly dimension, putting her spin on the notions of the macabre and the supernatural.
Finally, the Historiografie section showcased five recent restorations of important films from the past, including two works by Filipino master Lino Brocka. They completed a vibrant selection that, in more ways than one, established a dialogue with the more contemporary titles, highlighting how themes and sensibilities have evolved (or perhaps merely tried to evolve) over the decades. It may be history, but it’s far from ancient.