39th Viennale Peter Nestler, Fay Wray & the Avant-Garde
Thanks to the eclectic taste of critic-historian-festival director Hans Hurch, this year’s Viennale (19 - 31 October 2001) proved a veritable feast for all: the average moviegoer, the committed cineaste, the discerning film historian. The retrospective at the Austrian Film Museum »From the Heart of the World: The Cinema of the Central Asian Republics« was its most successful in years. The retro’s 109-page catalogue, edited by Andreas Ungerböck, included not only thoroughly researched filmographies of key directors and films, but it also covered the social background and political status quo of governments in Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan each of which had declared independence a decade ago. But it should be added that none of the three directors present Khodjakuli Narliev from Turkmenistan, Rachid Nugmanov and Serik Aprymov from Kazakhstan felt that a responsible national cinema in these republics can survive today without coproduction support from the West.
One glance at the »V’01 Pocket Guide«, and it’s clear this is a festival of of special programs that reach a bit beyond cinematic art. Austrian novelist Ilse Aichinger read from her new book »Film und Verhängnis« (Film and Fate), in which she shared her passion for cinema with her listeners in a kind of scrapbook commentary on last year’s Viennale. Hartmut Bitomsky, whose B-52 (USA, 1999-2001) documentary on the military bomber plane was presented at the festival, remembered the late Johann van der Keuken (1938-2001) with an insightful lecture on the Dutch filmmaker’s »North-South Triptycon« screened at the Viennale: The Diary (1972), The White Castle (1973), and The New Ice-Age (1974). French film pioneer Jean Painlevé (born 1902), whose early scientific films were acclaimed for their impressionist images, particularly those shot underwater, was remembered with four shorts that still take your breath away for their bizarre beauty: Hyas et Sténorinques (1929), L'Hippocampe (1934), Le Vampire (1939/45), and Oursins (1954).
The Avant-Garde, Past And Present
The Viennale traditionally leans towards the experimental and avant-garde. Jonas Mekas presented As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Glimpses of Beauty (USA), a poetic, personal film-diary covering three decades of his life in addition to contributing a quaint pair of Viennale 2001 trailers, titled Wien und Mozart and Elvis. Stan Brakhage experimented with scratched images and super-impositions in four new short films: Dance, Love Song, Love Song 2, and Occam’s Thread (USA, 2000). In a program titled »Photography and Beyond: Heinz Emigholz« the focus was on the German filmmaker’s preoccupation with space, design, and architecture in a series of shorts produced between 1974 and 2001. And Emigholz supplemented the cycle with his feature-length film-essay on the death of a friend: Der zynische Körper (The Cynical Body) (1986-90).
Each year, without fail, Hans Hurch is known to book a film by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. This time, he programmed three: their Antigone (Germany/France, 1991) and Operai, contadini (Workers, Peasants) (Italy/France, 2000), plus a new documentary by Portuguese admirer and filmmaker Pedro Costa on Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub, Cinéastes (Portugal/France, 2001). Subtitled Ôu git votre sourire enfoui? (Where Has Your Hidden Smile Gone?), it was shot during the couple’s editing of their film Sicilia! (France/Italy, 1999) at the Studio National des Arts Contemporaires in Le Fresnoy. To round out the picture, a festival slot was reserved for short films made by Alain Fleischer’s students at the Studio Le Fresnoy, an audiovisual research center located near Calais that’s opened to applicants from all educational backgrounds and creative artistic fields.
One reason why avant-garde directors can show their films before packed houses in Vienna is the support given to auteur directors by way of a special insert in the local newspaper. Thus, before the festival even opened, »Der Viennale Standard« had already spotlighted two German films that had previously premiered at the International Forum of Young Cinema in Berlin. Volker Koepp’s poetic documentary on the Kurische Nehrung (Curonian Spit), a promontory on the Baltic Sea, captures the harmony of man and nature on this elongated spit inhabited by Lithuanians, Russians, and Germans. Angela Schanelec’s Mein langsames Leben (Passing Summer, or My Slow Life) observes with a static camera a chain of encounters over the summer months among a group of friends and acquaintances. Since most of them are in their thirties, they are now conscious that some life-long decisions have to be made.
Another young auteur, French director Alain Guiraudie, was honored with a mini retrospective of four films. His shorts, shot in the 1990s, depicted everyday life in rural towns. By contrast, his debut feature, Du soleil pur le gueux (Sun for the Poor) (France, 2000), was shot outdoors in the limestone mountains of southern France. The flimsy story of a girl who comes from the city to explore this fantastic region, she meets people who appear out of nowhere and in an absurd manner bear an odd relationship in names and costumes to characters that evoke genre cinema.
Tribute to Peter Nestler
For many, the festival highlight was the tribute to Peter Nestler, the German-born, Swedish-settled documentary filmmaker who has made over 60 films during the past four decades. Altogether, 25 films were presented in the retrospective-workshop tribute beginning with his first documentary Am Siel (Germany, 1962), a short sketch about a small northern German seaside village, and ending with Flucht (Escape) (Germany, 2000), a portrait of Jewish painter Leopold Mayer, who fled Nazi Germany to hide in France under the name Leo Maillet and whose story is enhanced by integrating his paintings into the narrative. Over the years, with backing primarily from German and Swedish tv-commissioners until he could stand alone as a freelance documentary filmer, he has filmed topics of his conviction in the near and far corners of the world.
Available for open-ended discussion on his films, Peter Nestler leaned on this experiences as a globe-trotter to expanded at some length on how and why he chose his topics of interest: school children in Switzerland (Essays, 1963), political and economic conditions in Greece two years before the military junta (From Greece, 1965), a study of the British working class (A Worker’s Club in Sheffield, 1965), a hard-hitting personal statement on conditions in the Ruhr and why he left Germany (In the Ruhr Region, 1967), the plight of Gypsies in Austria (To Be a Gypsy, 1970), the images of war in Vietnam (Pictures from Vietnam, 1972), a collective portrait of volunteers in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War (Spanien!, 1973), a banned documentary statement on the reasons behind the coup in Chile (Chile Film, 1974), a plea to preserve an archive of texts and photographs owned by Swedish Television (Waiting, 1985), an excursion to the Indios of Ecuador (Pachamama Our Earth, 1995), and a journey through ancient Roman and medieval Italian history (The Roman Road in the Aosta Valley, 1998), to name just half of the retro.
Tribute to Fay Wray
For critics and cinéastes, the »Tribute to Fay Wray« was a real find, for it spotlighted the varied career of a screen actress who was equally well known in her day as a sophistical stage personality and part-time literary talent. Four of the six films in the retrospective dated from 1933, a year when she appeared in no less than eleven productions! Since each of this quartet had been produced at a different Hollywood studio Raoul Walsh’s The Bowery at United Artists, Michael Curtiz’s Mystery of the Wax Museum at Warner Bros, Edward Buzzel’s Ann Carver’s Profession at Columbia, and Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong at RKO 1933 saw her quite content drifting from genre to genre to work in upgraded, stylized »talkies« to match her stage personality. »After what they did to The Wedding March, I just wanted to get away from the big studios ... I had my fill of large-scale productions.«
In Harry Lachman’s It Happened in Hollywood (Columbia, 1937), a parody on Tom Mix westerns co-scripted by a young Samuel Fuller from Myles Connolly’s tale (»Once a Hero«), Fay Wray is seen returning to her roots as a teenager in two-reelers. While she was working outdoors under the blazing sun on films like The Saddle Tramp and The Wild Horse Stampede, a Paramount talent scout suggested she audition for Erich von Stroheim for the lead female role in The Wedding March (1928). Recalling that interview, Wray mused: »Stroheim didn’t even talk to me only to Mrs. Schley, who had brought me there but he kept looking over at me sitting in a corner. When we left, he simply took my hand and said: >Goodbye, Mitzi< and that was that!«
Ronald Holloway