Press Information April | May 2016

The Austrian Film Museum is pleased to welcome two outstanding figures of contemporary cinema to Vienna – Kelly Reichardt and Christian Petzold . Petzold will be present for five days of Q&A sessions, holding a seminar and a masterclass, and launching a full retrospective of his work and a substantial Carte Blanche program (April 7 – May 4). Kelly Reichardt will discuss her early features with the Vienna audience on May 5. A further program will focus on Kevin B. Lee , a chief protagonist of the exceedingly virulent video essay genre (April 18-20).

Inspired by Christian Petzold’s The State I Am In and Phoenix , the Film Museum also presents the thematic series Unreconciled (April 22 – May 4), relating to filmmaker and RAF member Holger Meins (1941–1974), the German Film and Television Academy ( dffb ) of the 1960s and the early work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet .

Straub-Huillet are at the center of a new English-language volume in the Film Museum’s book series , to be published in April and coinciding with a major touring retrospective of their films . The tour will start on May 6 at MoMA, New York, to be followed by many presentations in North America and Europe, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Christian Petzold Complete Works and Carte Blanche

When the Austrian Film Museum first dedicated a retrospective to Christian Petzold (b. 1960), his film Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In, 2000) had just “launched him from an insiders’ tip to one of German cinema’s most important protagonists” – an assessment that has since been confirmed several times over. As he perfected his unmistakable style (in fruitful collaboration with his co-writer Harun Farocki), award-winning films such as Gespenster, Yella and Jerichow pushed him ever further into the international spotlight.

Petzold works on phantom images of contemporary Germany, fed by a strong cinephiliac passion. He often invokes Claude Chabrol as a reference point, especially when it comes to the role of découpage . For both directors, film narration relies less on writing than on precise decisions about perspective, framing, and camera movement in a succession of shots. This choice of “cinematic terms” creates a terrain where subject, characters, and photographic realism can truly intertwine. Avoiding both the faux-documentary styling and the message-mongering which characterize large swaths of current art cinema, Petzold aims for a pared-down idea of artificiality – representing in concrete pictorial form what is latently present in his subject matter and in society: “Cinema is incredibly well-versed in the area of dreams and suppression. It doesn’t discover these things, of course, but the collective unconscious finds images and sounds in cinema. It deals with people who break under the circumstances and put up a fight.”

In recent years, Petzold has extended his explorations of the unconscious to historical subjects: the 1980s GDR story Barbara and the post-war psychological thriller Phoenix became his biggest international successes with audiences and critics alike. The only community to find fault with Phoenix was the German film scene – bearing evidence of the unique position Petzold has achieved. As his cinema moves further and further away from the conventional modes of the German film industry and its dreary consensus about debate-worthy topics, the subtle richness of his films appears to be more and more “foreign” to his compatriots.

Ever since his graduation feature, the road movie Pilotinnen (1995), Petzold’s work has been marked by a cool and meticulous fusion of German reality and mythical blueprints , especially when it comes to his beloved genre of crime fiction (e.g. rewriting The Postman Always Rings Twice against the backdrop of the Afghanistan War in Jerichow ). He is no stranger to ghost stories either: The State I Am In is haunted by the RAF past, Yella by the economic “annexation” of Eastern Germany, while Phoenix summons the phantoms of the Holocaust – putting on an upscale zombie version of Orpheus and Eurydice with highlights of Fassbinderian melodrama, Franjuian horror and an all-embracing noir ambivalence. Last but not least, Phoenix strongly reinforces the point that Petzold has always made films about love: another myth at the core of cinema.

The 21 films he has selected for his Carte Blanche program take us further into Christian Petzold’s notion of his chosen discipline. For him, cinema is a “Proustian medium”, anchored in processes of recollection: “Some think that reflection ruins the vigour and freshness of one’s approach, but I believe it leads to another kind of authenticity.” These are the films he watches together with the crew and the actors in preparation for making a film. “Cinema is a collective, we have to be well-aligned, just as if we were preparing a bank robbery.” New perspectives are gained along the way: “The film becomes another film if one sees it in the company of two different actors.”

The relation between Petzold’s Carte Blanche titles and his own films is only partly thematic. For instance, István Szabó’s Bizalom corresponds with Phoenix through its world war topic, but above all in its portrait of a couple whose relationship begins as a game and grows into love. Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady engrosses Petzold by virtue of its “weak men” and the absurdity of its plot complications. A strong woman such as Petzold’s Beischlafdiebin echoes back to a supporting character in Don Siegel’s gangster film Charley Varrick . Points of contact may also be provided by certain patterns of cinematic movement – filming a long walk ( Gespenster and La Fille seule ) or depicting “motorized phantoms“ ( The State I Am In and Near Dark ) – or via characters who make similar choices under different historical conditions ( Yella and American Gigolo/Pretty Woman ).

That is how a Proustian medium can remind itself (and its viewers) of its (and their) places and times. Christian Petzold works toward maintaining this strength in the 21st century flood of images. His films tell us a true story of Germany and of the cinema, and what it means to dwell there.

At the Film Museum, Christian Petzold will hold several Q&As, a masterclass in collaboration with the Vienna Screenwriters Forum , and, together with Ralph Eue and Linda Söffker, a seminar for students of the University of Vienna. April 7 to May 4, 2016

The Aesthetics of Analysis Kevin B. Lee – In Person

The short films of Kevin B. Lee (b. 1975) can be interpreted as a contemporary response to Raymond Bellour’s “dispossession of the object” of film by its transfer into language or writing. Crowned the “King of Video Essays” by the New York Times, Lee has been producing critical- analytical works on cinema since 2007 – at first via his blog shootingdownpictures , and now also as contributions to New York’s MoMI and, on a weekly basis, to Fandor. His body of work has

2

come to include more than 250 pieces, encompassing analyses of individual films, artists’ portraits and essayistic reflections on the relations of cinema, technology and society.

Alongside Lee’s precise examinations of films (invariably guided by personal preferences), a specific aesthetic of analysis comes to light in his work. By means of moving images and sounds, Lee scrutinizes these very forms of expression – giving rise to works that also represent a poetic form, creating their very own island in cinema. Lee’s remarkable Transformers: The Premake , for instance, was screened in the avant-garde section of the Rotterdam Film Festival while being celebrated as one of the best “documentaries” of 2014 by Sight & Sound.

The program organized by the Film Museum is the first comprehensive tribute in recognition of Lee’s work. It invites audiences to join the author’s balancing act on the fine line between theory and art, and to plumb the potential depths of his critical method. In line with the permanent progression of his work(s), Kevin B. Lee will hold “live-performances” along with some of his pieces, also slipping in selected video essays by other authors into the screenings.

April 18 to 20, 2016

Unreconciled

Films by, with and about Holger Meins – and by Roberto Rossellini, Peter Lorre, Straub- Huillet, Walter Krüttner, Harun Farocki, Johannes Beringer, Helke Sander, Gerd Conradt, Thomas Giefer, Günter Peter Straschek, Renate Sami, Gerhard Friedl, Jean-Gabriel Périot

The works selected for this program yield a constellation of stars. The galaxy in question may seem light years away, but it concerns anyone who believes that art making can still be an oppositional practice – and that it has an existential dimension. A quote by Holger Meins could serve as an alternative headline for the program: “Everyone dies; what matters is how, and how you lived.”

Meins, who went underground as a young filmmaker and joined the RAF, was born 75 years ago. 50 years ago, in September 1966, Berlin mayor Willy Brandt inaugurated the German Film and Television Academy (dffb), whose first generation of students was to include Meins, alongside Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky, Helke Sander, Johannes Beringer, Gerd Conradt and others. “The atmosphere at the school was politically charged from the very beginning. In the aftermath of June 2, 1967, when Benno Ohnesorg was shot by the police, many students became radicalized. Several were temporarily expelled after occupying the dean’s office and symbolically renaming the institution the ‘Dziga Vertov Academy’. A number of films from this period saw themselves as direct instruction manuals for the ‘revolutionary struggle’ or raised the question of the need for violent resistance. ” (Claudia Lenssen)

Austrian-born Günter Peter Straschek (1942–2009) was also part of the first dffb generation. In 1975, after attempting to put socialist filmmaking to work in numerous sectors of society, he published the Handbook against Cinema and began his decades-long research into the history of German-speaking exile filmmakers. “To find out what weighed on GPS’s mind, it is enough to hear him read the letters Arnold Schoenberg wrote to Wassily Kandinsky in Huillet & Straub’s Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene’: some of the

3

demarcation and edge found there was a part of his own character.” (Johannes Beringer)

Entire libraries are devoted to the question of how post-1945 German society dealt with its pre- 1945 history. Within these libraries, several shelves are dedicated to a breaking point delayed by 20 years. The aim of both the student movement and the militant groups was to raise people’s awareness of and consequently put a stop to certain explicit or subliminal continuities between the National Socialist State and post-war Germany. For the generation of Straschek, Bitomsky and Farocki, the work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet was an early, rare, and formative example of such a breaking point in German cinema, beginning with Machorka-Muff (1962) and Nicht versöhnt (1964/65). Their later film Moses and Aaron (1974) is dedicated to Holger Meins, by then a public enemy who had died while on hunger strike.

The German films of Italian Roberto Rossellini ( Germany, Year Zero, 1948) and the returned émigré Peter Lorre ( The Lost One, 1951) mark equally rare ruptures. Dealing with guilt takes center stage – a guilt that did not simply disappear in 1945, but continued and even grew in new ways. Recognizing the guilt and being able to see it (even with one’s eyes shut) brings no reconciliation here. Both films end in tragedy. But their cathartic potential was overlooked as well: they met with rejection and were hardly shown in German and Austrian cinemas.

In his film Phoenix (2014), Christian Petzold – a later dffb graduate, taught by the likes of Bitomsky and Farocki, who would become his co-author – looks back on this culture of post-war blindness. Recent films by Gerhard Friedl (1967-2000) and Jean-Gabriel Périot (b. 1974) also spin the threads from the perspective of later generations, but they do so in very different ways. Using only archival footage, Périot reconstructs A German Youth (that of the ’60s and ’70s, with a focus on the dffb between 1966 and ‘68), whereas Friedl, in his Wolff von Amerongen, re-examines the economic history of Germany in the 20th century as a history of dismal continuities. The images he selects to accompany this story can be found in the landscapes of capitalism: in the present.

“The things that might come up in this conversation of ours won’t be particularly pleasant for either of us.” (Peter Lorre, The Lost One ) April 22 to May 4, 2016

An Evening with Kelly Reichardt

Ever since her international breakthrough with Wendy and Lucy (2008), the magnificent portrait of a drifter and her dog, Kelly Reichardt’s films have regularly been released in Austria – and “Wendy“ Michelle Williams has since become her iconic actress. Reichardt is now recognized as one of the key American auteurs , practicing a cinema that wrings deeply humane perspectives from both the economically precarious present and the history of violence in the US (as in the case of her film about western pioneers, Meek’s Cutoff ).

However, Reichardt’s earlier feature films have had few screenings in Austria. On the occasion of the restoration of her Bonnie & Clyde -inspired debut River of Grass (1994) and the acquisition of her second film Old Joy (2006, featuring Will Oldham) for the collection of the Film Museum, the director is traveling to Vienna to personally present both of these films to the audience.

May 5, 2016

4

Film Selection

Christian Petzold – Complete Works and Carte Blanche

Pilotinnen 1995, Christian Petzold Cléo de 5 à 7 1961, Agnès Varda Cuba Libre 1996, Christian Petzold La Femme infidèle 1969, Claude Chabrol Die Beischlafdiebin 1998, Christian Petzold Klute 1971, Alan J. Pakula Die innere Sicherheit 2000, Christian Petzold Rocker 1972, Klaus Lemke Toter Mann 2001, Christian Petzold Charley Varrick 1973, Don Siegel Wolfsburg 2003, Christian Petzold The Driver 1978, Walter Hill Gespenster 2005, Christian Petzold Saint Jack 1979, Peter Bogdanovich Yella 2007, Christian Petzold Bizalom 1980, István Szabó Jerichow 2008, Christian Petzold American Gigolo 1980, Paul Schrader Etwas Besseres als den Tod 2011, Ch. Petzold Thief 1981, Michael Mann Barbara 2012, Christian Petzold …All the Marbles 1981, Robert Aldrich Phoenix 2014, Christian Petzold Near Dark 1987, Kathryn Bigelow Kreise 2015, Christian Petzold Pretty Woman 1990, Garry Marshall La Fille seule 1995, Beno ȋt Jacquot Phantom Lady 1944, Robert Siodmak Les Voleurs 1996, André Téchiné Border Incident 1950, Anthony Mann La stanza del figlio 2001, Nanni Moretti He Ran All the Way 1951, John Berry Le Petit lieutenant 2005, Xavier Beauvois Imitation of Life 1959, Douglas Sirk

For more information and photos, please visit www.filmmuseum.at or contact: Alessandra Thiele, [email protected] , phone 43-1-533 70 54 ext. 22 Eszter Kondor, [email protected] , phone 43-1-533 70 54 ext. 12

5