FOCUS:

Take a good look at »Diagonale 05« ­ the Festival of Austrian Films in the picturesque medieval university town of Graz. After two years of infighting to win administrative independence from the Austrian Cultural Ministry in Vienna, this year’s Diagonale (14-20 March 2005) reinvented itself to set new standards of interlinking programming in film and video. Described by one critic as a veritable »labyrinth« ­ rather than »showcase« ­ of current production, the six-day »Diagonale 05« will go down in the books as the best in his topsy-turvy history. The catalogue alone runs 312 pages, packed with information on every phase of current film and video production in Austria, backed by an Internet Service to keep the public and the professionals informed of every wrinkle of change in the Graz program.

Of the circa 500 productions in every conceivable format sent for entry consideration, 240 were programmed to usually overflowing crowds in four scattered arthouse venues. The opening night gala took place in the roomy Helmut-List-Halle, while certain productions fit else and more appropriately in the Kunsthaus Graz, the Medienturm Zentral, or the Technical University Graz. With an operating budget of 1.2 million Euros, the trio of managing directors ­ Birgit Flos, Robert Buchschwenter, and Georg Tillner ­ could engage a staff of 70 assistants in Vienna and Graz for three months of planning to assure that few, if any, important films or videos would fall through the programming net. And with over 100,000 Euros in prize money to be won at Graz, few Austrian filmmakers risked bypassing the Diagonale for riper pickings at other festivals. Besides, even the handful of films earmarked for this year’s Cannes could return next year to Diagonale 06.

»We are doing our best to make the Diagonale in the future an international as well as national event,« said programming director Birgit Flos. The first step in this direction was a program of Turkish films for Graz minority moviegoers. Another was the »Film-Karawane« section, a program of foreign-language entries from three European festivals: the DokMa Festival in neighboring Maribor/Slovenia, the Budapest Film Days in Hungary, and the Göteborg Film Festival in Sweden. By the same token, a number of Austrian international coproductions were screened in their original languages, sometimes with beamed German subtitles. As for the key Diagonale sections - features, documentaries, and short films (including animation and experimental films) from the 2004/2005 season ­ all these entries were amply documented in the festival catalogue with 100 pages of factual information, introductory essays, and supportive critical echoes. Other national film festival should have it so good.

Cineastes and film historians flocked to the retrospective programs. This being the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, a bundle of features, documentaries, and newsreels were screened from the Austrian Film Archive and other archival sources. A seldom seen Deutschland erwache (Wake Up Germany) (1945), a postwar documentary on the Nazi concentration camps produced by the U.S. Signal Corps, was coupled with Ostmark Wochenschau (Ostmark Newsreel) (1938), a chronicle of Hitler’s triumphant reception in Graz shortly after the Austrian annexation. Among other highlights were a pair of Russian newsreels: Josef Poselsky’s The Liberation of Vienna (USSR, 1945), depicting the entry of the Red Army into Vienna, and Roman Karmen’s Austria Meets an Ambassador of Peace (USSR, 1960), a chronicle of Nikita Khrushchev’s later visit to Vienna. Not to be overlooked as well were two naively conceived (yet all the more entertaining today) feature films on political themes of yesterday. Phil Jutzi’s Asew. Der Spion und Verräter (Asev ­ Spy and Traitor) (Germany, 1935) stars Fritz Rasp in the role of super spy Evno Asev, a real-life figure who for 15 years worked as a double-agent for the Tsarist regime while at the same time heading a revolutionary terrorist organization until unmasked in 1908. And Vjekoslav Afric’s Slavica (Yugoslavia, 1947), the first Yugoslav-produced feature film, is the story of an heroic partisan girl who leads a resistance group on the Croatian coast at a time when Stalin was as venerated as Tito by the Yugoslav populace.

One of the treats of Diagonale 05 was the five-film retrospective honoring a neglected master of Czech and European cinema: Gustav Machaty (1901-1963). Programmed under the rubric »Eros / Ekstasen / Exil« and accompanied by introductory lectures, the series took on extra importance due to the recent publication of Christian Cargnelli’s well researched biography, Gustav Machaty ­ Ein Filmregisseur zwischen Prag und Hollywood. Of course, every cineaste is familiar with that scandalous bathing scene in Ektase (Ecstasy) (Czechoslovakia, 1933), featuring neglected wife Hedy Kiesler (later Hedy Lamarr) undressing on a hot day for a swim in a lake, but even the responsible film lexicons generally overlook the contribution made in that film by the »Machaty trademark«: visually crafted scenes in which the camera told the story without the intrusion of spoken dialogue. Indeed, the Machaty films were a real revelation for most viewers: Erotikon (Czechoslovakia, 1929), Za soboty na nedeli (From Saturday to Sunday) (Czechoslovakia, 1931) Nocturno (Austria, 1934), and Jealousy (USA, 1945). Indeed, the Gustav Machaty retro should go on a festival tour, although a restored print of the original uncut version of Ecstasy is highly desirable.

As for contemporary Austrian hits and award-winners at Graz, these were features and documentaries that signaled a new wave of young talent already seen at other international festivals: Hans Weingartner’s political pamphlet Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators) (Cannes), Jessica Hausner’s psychodrama Hotel (Cannes), Wolfgang Murnberger’s anticlerical thriller Silentium (Berlin), Jörg Kalt’s Crash Test Dummies (Berlin), and Hubert Sauper’s hard-hitting Tansanian-shot documentary Darwin’s Nightmare, an Austrian-French-Belgian coproduction awarded Best European Documentary of 2004. On closing night, during an extended evening of award announcements, Jessica Hausner’s Hotel was awarded the Grand Prize of the Diagonale in the feature film category. On the documentary side, Angelika Schuster and Tristan Sindelgruber’s Operation Spring was a sellout on the very day tickets went on sale. An expose of the longest criminal investigation in Austrian history, involving the prosecution of a Nigerian drug ring that came to an end in 1999, the film serves notice not only on inside maneuvers in a court case, but also on police investigative methods (under the code name »Operation Spring«) and the arrest of circa 100 African refugees living in Austria at that time.

Lastly, there were the fascinating documentary portraits of film directors and personalities: Michael Palm’s Edgar G. Ulmer ­ Der Man im Off (Edgar G. Ulmer ­ The Man Off-Screen), George Misch’s Calling Hedy Lamarr, Nina Kusturica and Eva Testor’s 24 Wirklichkeiten in der Sekunde &shy Michael Haneke im Film (24 Realities in a Second ­ Michael Haneke in Film), and Joerg Burger, In Wirklichkeit ist alles ganz anders ­ Der Filmemacher Wilhelm Gaube (In Reality Everything Is Quite Different &sh< The Filmmaker Wilhelm Gaube). Nowadays, a festival without films about filmmaking is, indeed, a rarity.

Ron Holloway