Michael Bürgermeister

The Seine flowsgently towards Notre Dame, along with the traffic, when a postman peddles up with a telegram for an American composer who lies asleep.  His Austrian aunt has died, and he celebrates with borrowed money, inviting everybody to a party, including Jean Luc Godard, who listens again and again to the same record.

In 1993 a short film On the Road with Emil by the Kitzbühl born Hubert Sauper, was shown in Vienna’s Künslerhauskino.  It was a wonderfully poetic, yet melancholy documentary by the then 27 year old filmmaker about life on the road with a circus. Yet this audience of mainly film students thought little of it; so few were surprised when Hubert Sauper, who had just finished studying at the Film Academy, moved to Paris. 

An old man, with lined face, sparkling eyes, white hair and dark moustache, tosses and turns in his sleep. He recounts a “weird and very unpleasant dream.”  During his morning walk he loses his way in empty streets full of ruined houses. He looks up at a clock and sees it has no hands. He pulls out his own watch and sees that it doesn’t have hands either. He takes off his hat, strokes his head and leans against a wall before he continues.  

An invisible Christoph Schlingensief presented one of the “best” and “most honest” productions at this year’s Festwochen in June -- via Skype. More exactly he presented its performers: musicians, composers, dancers, actors from Germany and Burkino Faso.

Alexander Horwath of the Austrian Film Museum has developed a knack for throwing together disparate films to great effect – such as Le Pére de mes enfants (The Father of My Children) by Mia Hansen-Løve and Woyzeck by Werner Herzog; or Cries and Whispers by Bergman and The Red Shoes by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The pairing works because one is pleasantly surprised at how films with different styles and contents complement one another. They are much like two different courses in a meal.

When “Mitch” tears off a Chinese lantern and exposes the face of “Blanche DuBois” to the glare of a light bulb, he is not merely exposing her personal lies and hypocrisy but those of society as a whole. Both director Elia Kazan and playwright Tennessee Williams were perfectly clear in their aim in A Streetcar Named Desire: to put truth on the screen.

A covey of town dignitaries in frock coats and top hats flock around a statue hidden under a tarp before the eager eyes of the gathered crowd. The men turn, with great pomp and circumstance, lift the cloth to unveil the city’s newest monument. What they find instead is a monument of a different sort: The Tramp, in ill-fitting jacket and undersized derby, is sitting there huddled at its base – an icon of 20th century cinema.

A man stands alongside his co-conspirators against the wall of an army headquarters in Berlin. He is considered to be the most brilliant officer in the German Army, is a decorated war hero, is loved and admired by all who know him, and is worshipped by his young wife and their five children.

A glittering career is prophesied him and he is expected to be, one day, the next chief of staff. He has just one problem: He cannot reconcile serving the Nazi regime with his Catholic conscience. Thus as has now become familiar to a new generation through the recent film Valkyrie, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenber chose death before dishonor.

An Indian woman, her head tilted back, draws open a curtain to reveal her smiling son, Russian corpses are photographed in a Moscow morgue and dressed up in power clothes, a huge wire head is presented by a Spaniard, a Polish girl estimates how many bars of soap she can get.

Nobody can accuse the Viennese gallery scene of being either provincial or of avoiding tough topics. Of course Vienna has its fair share of galleries which play safe and present either local matadors or simply boring art, but there is currently a hint of risk in the air, despite the heavy indent of the crisis, which bodes well for the future.