Arts and Letters

The Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF) does more than screen premieres and import Hollywood’s glamour to one of the poorest cities in the Balkans. It is a time when the city itself tries to heal the scars left from the war through the power of cinema.

“This festival in particular – the reason why many directors, actors, and producers come every year – celebrates that freedom that its birth gave it,” says Cat Villiers, British Co-producer of No Man’s Land.

In one film, a nameless man begins to shave. Suddenly blood trickles down his throat. The more he shaves the more blood trickles until his throat is covered in blood. In another, we see the interior of a church and suddenly hear rock music. In yet another, petty gangsters play with guns to the sound of reggae. In yet another, we see a familiar face, Harvey Keitel, flicking playing cards in the direction of a naked prostitute in a desolate room to the throbbing sound of “The End” by The Doors.

Most people think of fairy tales as a world of innocence and happy endings. Not if you ask the children, though, who thrive on the fears of dragons and wolves and grandmothers in disguise. There is nothing innocent about fairytales; they take the language of fantasy to talk about primal fears.

“I need the gaiety of Mozart, his beauty, his objectivity and his melancholy,” wrote choreographer Uwe Scholz of Mozart’s Piano Concerto E-flat major, KV 271, “…not steered by any sort of narcissism, but by a tragic power.”

Peter Sellars, the least meretricious of master Regisseurs, offered the Wiener Festwochen public an uncut, transfixing production of Shakespeare’s Othello this June.

In this quirky comedy billing itself as a psychedelic road movie, Austrian director Michael Glawogger takes us on a bizarre and colorful romp in which hallucinations and confusion are the rule. Happily eccentric and full of idiosyncratic characterization and dialogue, and with more than a sprinkling of stereotypes and clichés thrown in, Contact High’s raw humor had the audience laughing out loud at the Votiv Kino where the film had been showing since early May. But be forewarned: without a strong grasp of dialect, you may find yourself lagging a joke or two behind.

“The only thing worse than classical music is new music,” said a close friend who in early May refused to join me to a concert of the Klangforum Wien, the virtuosos of the contemporary music scene in Vienna. I knew what he meant: Rhythm, melody and tonality as we are still used to considering essential to music were long ago abandoned by composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. The feeling of tension and release we get from tonality has given way to disconnection and wandering. There is nothing to hold onto anymore.

Ferdinand George Waldmüller was fascinated by light. His remarkable study Elm Trees in the Prater is a wild array of color captured on the bark and leaves radiating in the bright sunlight setting off shadows that outline the angular, contortions of the trees, a rush of life and energy. Waldmüller was breaking new ground in his time, moving away from the Dutch traditions of using light as a dramatic effect, and instead studied how light can transform color.

Driving Miss Daisy is a moving tale of two people forming an unlikely friendship. Set in the American South of the 1950s and 60s against a backdrop of racial tensions, the play traces the relationship between the Jewish Miss Daisy Wertham and her Afro-American driver, Hoke.

The Salvatorsaal, a late-baroque room with frescoed ceiling and windows to a tiny garden, is tucked into a corner of one the buildings attached to the Barnabiten Church on the Mariahilferstraße and its cacophony of shopping, cars and fast food. Amazingly, this small room is a miracle of silence – the perfect site for a “concert in historical places:” the twenty-third of the series “Unknown Masterpieces of the Renaissance,” May 6 and 8, with René Clemencic on the clavichord.