During the 1930s, Austrian film production companies developed a process to navigate the competing demands of audiences in Nazi Germany and those found in broader Western markets. InScreening ...Transcendence, film historian Robert Dassanowsky explores how Austrian filmmakers during the Austrofascist period (1933-1938) developed two overlapping industries: "Aryanized" films for distribution in Germany, its largest market, and "Emigrantenfilm," which employed émigré and Jewish talent that appealed to international audiences.
Through detailed archival research in both Vienna and the United States, Dassanowsky reveals what was culturally, socially, and politically at stake in these two simultaneous and overlapping film industries. Influenced by French auteurism, admired by Italian cinephiles, and ardently remade by Hollywood, these period Austrian films demonstrate a distinctive regional style mixed with transnational influences.
Combining brilliant close readings of individual films with thoroughly informed historical and cultural observations, Dassanowsky presents the story of a nation and an industry mired in politics, power, and intrigue on the brink of Nazi occupation.
New Austrian film Dassanowsky, Robert; Speck, Oliver C
2011., 20110415, 2011, 2011-04-15
eBook
Out of a film culture originally starved of funds have emerged rich and eclectic works by film-makers that are now achieving the international recognition that they deserve: Barbara Albert, Michael ...Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, and Stefan Ruzowitzky, to give four examples. This comprehensive critical anthology, by leading scholars of Austrian film, is intended to introduce and make accessible this much under-represented phenomenon. Although the book covers the full development of the Austrian new wave it focuses on the period that has brought it global attention: 1998 to the present.New Austrian Filmis the only book currently available on this topic and will be an essential reference work for academics, students and filmmakers, interested in modern Austrian film.
Appreciated today only for the style of the early- and mid-1960s Hollywood studio product, the crime comedy film featured strong female roles that paralleled the collapse of the traditional female ...roles in the era's spy films. Influenced by Hitchcock's sexualized women and Audrey Hepburn's independent 1950s gamines, the female "caper" character of the 1960s signals a dislocation of women's roles brought on by a world caught between hedonism and political avowal. In this short-lived subgenre, larcenous-minded men are thwarted, mostly to their own advantage, in their attempt to force female accomplices and love interests into prescribed social behavior and appearance. The lack of an overt counterculture in these films has branded them "establishment" products, supposedly rife with the social and gender role conservatism they actually challenge and destabilize.
Die Berliner Schule gilt als die wichtigste Strömung im deutschen Kino seit den 1970er Jahren. Gleichzeitig kann sie als wesentlicher Teil der globalen New-Wave-Filme verstanden werden, die an den ...traditionellen Rändern des Weltkinos angesiedelt sind. In 15 Essays setzen die Beiträger*innen des Bandes die Berliner Schule mit Beispielen des globalen Kinos in Verbindung - von Europa über Südostasien und den Nahen Osten bis hin zu Süd- und Nordamerika - und laden dazu ein, sie als zentralen Aspekt des Nachwende-Kinos in einem transnationalen Licht zu betrachten. Damit liefern sie zum ersten Mal eine systematische Untersuchung dieser Gattung und stellen sie als eine der wichtigsten Entwicklungen des gegenwärtigen Arthouse-Kinos heraus.
The mainstream film industry under Austrofascism had to accept National Socialist 'Aryanization' laws to export films to Germany and was thus forced, by economic pressures and shared talent, to ...provide films that would also satisfy Nazism. The representation of space, particularly that of the (shared) Alps, provided a significant but often confusing cultural platform for Austrian and German cinema to reflect on national ideology and position it against the Other. Three films representing the hybridization of popular genres of the era — Konzert in Tirol (1938), Spiegel des Lebens (1938) and Hotel Sacher (1939) — demonstrate how the Alps as image or by suggestion function in the (de)construction of Austrian national identity, and how both cinemas used the Romantic tensions between the rural and the urban to support their agendas. Um ihre Filme auch in Deutschland zeigen zu können, sah sich die österreichische Filmindustrie zur Zeit des Austrofaschismus gezwungen, sich an die Arisierungsgesetze Deutschlands anzupassen. Unter finanziellem Druck und mit der gezielten Einsetzung von gleichzeitig in Deutschland tätigem Personal hat man versucht, Filme zu produzieren, die den nationalsozialistischen Forderungen gerecht wurden. Die Darstellung des Raums und vor allem der gemeinsamen Alpen diente dem österreichischen sowie dem deutschen Film als wichtiges Mittel, Nationalideologie (nicht ohne Ambivalenz) widerzuspiegeln und distinktiv zu prägen. Die drei Filme Konzert in Tirol (1938), Spiegel des Lebens (1938) und Hotel Sacher (1939) dienen als Beispiele der Hybridisierung im damaligen Populärfilm. In allen drei wird die österreichische Nationalidentität durch die Alpen (de)konstruktiv dargestellt, was anhand der aus der Romantik bekannten, für den österreichischen wie auch den deutschen Film typischen Zwiespalt zwischen Stadt und Land gezeigt werden kann.
Von Dassanowsky discusses the role played by Stefan Ruzowitzky's 1997 Die Siebtelbauern on the critical and commercial successes of the New Austrian Heimatfilm. The genre of Heimatfilm, which began ...in Austrian silent film and flourished in both Austria and Germany in dramatic and comedic forms in to the 1960s, was as much an ideological statement as it was an exportable promotion of rural beauty.
Alexander Lernet-Holenia's desire for a return to what he deemed Austria's true Central European role as a polyglot and elitist cultural nation was paralleled by his frustrated search for personal ...identity as either an illegitimate child of a Habsburg archduke, or the son of his father of record, whose claims to descent from French nobility remained unsubstantiated. His references to the French "ancien régime", in texts dealing with or allegorizing Austrian history, stress an Austrian identity that is culturally grounded outside its relationship with Germany. Lernet-Holenia's evocation of French elements relating to his personal history also informs his understanding and representation of Austrian identity. Alexander Lernet-Holenias Verlangen nach einer Rückkehr zur, so wie er es sah, wahren mitteleuropäischen Rolle Osterreichs als polyglotte und elitäre Kulturnation, war mit seiner frustrierenden Suche nach seiner persönlichen Identität gleichgestellt, entweder der des unehelichen Sohnes eines Habsburger Erzherzogs oder als Sohn seines in den Urkunden bezeichneten Vaters, dessen Behauptung, adeliger französischer Abstammung zu sein, unbewiesen blieb. Seine Verweise auf das "ancien régime" in Texten, die von der österreichischen Geschichte handeln oder diese allegorisieren, betonen eine österreichische Identität, die außerhalb der Beziehung zu Deutschland kulturell fundiert ist. Lernet-Holenias Heraufbeschwörung französischer Elemente, die mit seiner persönlichen Geschichte in Zusammenhang stehen, informiert auch sein Verständnis und seine Repräsentation der österreichischen Identität.
