Press Information January | February 2016 Rome a City on Film, 1945
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Press Information January | February 2016 At the Austrian Film Museum, the year 2016 already starts as early as Christmas 2015 – by virtue of a new DVD release , Apichatpong Weerasethakul's first feature Mysterious Object at Noon . The new season of exhibition programs is anchored by two major retrospectives: Rome – A City on Film (from January 8) and Guy Debord (from January 29). After acquiring the essential film works by the French artist, writer and cultural theorist for the collection in 2015, the Film Museum will now present his oeuvre in its entirety in the presence of Alice Debord and Olivier Assayas. Rome A City on Film, 1945–1980 The stage for the first Film Museum retrospective in the new year is set in one of the great metropolises of old Europe: Rome, the proverbial Eternal City, enveloped in ancient as well as latter- day myths. However, in the light of this show, Rome is made thoroughly present and concrete , as habitat and focal point of the social development of postwar Italy. The years spanning from 1945 to 1980 also denote the Golden Age of Italian cinema – and Rome was not merely the center of production for the era, it acted as a prime location for the kinds of stories keenly lapped up by mass audiences; back then, before the triumph of commercial television, social reality and the public sphere of mainstream cinema were still intimately intertwined. Rome was captured in the midst of its contemporary transformations by the major “artistic” filmmakers such as Fellini, Antonioni and Pasolini just as much as by the brilliant minds of comedy (Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi or Ettore Scola ), and by auteurs such as Luciano Emmer, Pietro Germi or Mauro Bolognini, the majority of whose work still awaits rediscovery. Their projections of the city are populated by a rich gallery of idiosyncratic types and exceptional actors such as Marcello Mastroianni and Anna Magnani, Vittorio Gassman and Monica Vitti, Totò, the king of Italian comedy, and Alberto Sordi, a performer who truly embodied the uomo italiano of the postwar decades. Sordi is also the one who guides the retrospective along a path leading from postwar neorealism (Sotto il sole di Roma ), through the heyday of Commedia all'italiana (with its satirical, wrathful and melancholic gaze directed at the economic miracle, urban growth, escalating consumerism and its accompanying alienation) up to visions of absolute collapse . The maddening congestion in Luigi Comencini's L'ingorgo (1979) brings the program to a finale: an all-star cast finds itself imprisoned on the GRA beltway encircling Rome – the "closed" city as an allegorical counterpoint to the historical entry, Roberto Rossellini's classic Rome, Open City (1945). Rossellini's unvarnished portrait of devastation and human plight was instrumental in the worldwide success of neoverismo . Meanwhile, Fascist romanità continued to exert a formative influence on the city . Mussolini's regime had turned Rome into a prestigious showcase, emptying the city centre of the undesirable poor, displaced to numerous precarious borgate , sub-proletarian settlements on the distant periphery, leaving nothing but a few solitary ancient monuments in their wake. As millions streamed in from the poor South in the aftermath of the war, the trend carried on – housing shortage and illegal speculation make up the historical backdrop of dramas ( Roma ore 11 , 1952) as well as comedies (in Totò cerca casa from 1949, Totò attempts to move into the colosseum). Simultaneously, Luciano Emmer's Domenica d'agosto (1950) delivers a cross section of Roman popular culture with its weekenders gathered on the beach of Ostia, while Fellini's fake fotoromanzi in Lo sceicco bianco (1952) or Antonioni's case study of a starlet, La signora senza camelie (1953), already bring these realistic images of Rome face to face with the false promises of newly stirred up escapist fantasies. In fact, the studio-town of Cinecittà (inaugurated by Mussolini in 1937) and its imaginary Rome play merely the role of vanishing point in the retrospective. In Visconti's Bellissima (1951), Anna Magnani sacrifices everything for the film career of her talentless daughter; similar hopes (attended by graver disillusionment) run through Antonio Pietrangeli's sad and beautiful ballad to the boom era, Io la conoscevo bene (1965). By that time, the glamour of the cinematic metropolis appears long dimmed, a ghostly world of paparazzi and ennui as depicted in Fellini's La dolce vita , boasting the greatest collection of modern movie icons of Rome. That same year, the famous scene of Anita Ekberg wading through the Trevi fountain is joined by a completely different view of the same location in Monicelli's Risate di gioia , starring Magnani and Totò – one of many examples of the prismatic image of Roman locations created by the films in this program. Amid the stock exchange frenzy and the "apocalyptic" final scene of a deserted city, Antonioni's L'eclisse (1962) examines the increasing urban estrangement of the upper classes. Pasolini's passions or Raffaele Andreassi 's portrayals of prostitutes ( L'amore povero , 1963) depict the phenomenon in the lower classes, revealing everyday Roman habitats utterly devoid of any glamour. Fellini ventured into the borgate for 1957's Le notti di Cabiria but, in Pasolini's opinion, not far enough: his own protagonists, in Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), live on the very outskirts of the city in sub-proletarian misery. Corruption by way of consumerism and conformism is the underside of the boom . The levelling effect of television first manifests itself in the 1960s, at the same time as mass motorization wipes out street culture : the new "workforce conveyor belts" drive out public meeting places, as boccia clubs and dance halls give way to shopping centers. While in Domenica d'agosto cars were still an exception, by the time of L’ingorgo they have become the symbol of inexorable calamity – consequently tapered to a point in the ubiquitous beltway congestion, indispensable even in Fellini's Roma (1972), his final tribute to the capital. In C'eravamo tanti amati (1977), an updating of Dino Risi’s and Alberto Sordi’s central work Una vita difficile (1961), Ettore Scola casts one last melancholy gaze at the lost ideals of the past decades before the collapse arrives: in Scola's own Ugly, Dirty and Bad (1976) and for Sordi as An Average Little Man (1977). The public sphere has shrunk, social options have dwindled, but Rome remains infinitely great. "Whoever should observe the phenomenon of this city, growing from year to year, month to month, day to day," writes Pasolini, "is bound to notice that the eye seems to be the sole means of gaining insight." For five weeks, the eye can now roam this city, gaining insight into the layers of Rome – and beyond. The retrospective is presented in cooperation with the Cineteca Nazionale and Istituto Luce – Cinecittà, with the kind support of the Italian Cultural Institute in Vienna. January 8 to February 11, 2016 Guy Debord "Coming soon to a cinema near you: THE SOCIETY OF SPECTACLE. And soon thereafter, everywhere else, ITS DESTRUCTION." The unconditional announcement of revolution in Guy Debord's trailer for his film The Society of the Spectacle strikes one as almost a joke. In fact, it is one, not merely in today's society of the heightened spectacle, but already in the framework of 1973 when the film was made. Just like the entire oeuvre of Guy Debord (1931-1994), however, the joke yields its cutting meaning only when seen not as the usual muscle relaxation following a rigidly struck 2 pose of absoluteness , but as the most genuine intensification of such absoluteness. It is the grimmest gallows humor in 20th century art, cinema and social theory. At the same time, Debord's lucid severity reveals another kind of life, even if only by emphatically insisting on those (biographical) experiences of freedom and revolt which he conjures up in his films time and time again. He protected this other life by refusing to "play the game", never turning into one of those common public intellectuals (court jesters) populating the spectacle as "critical minds". Instead, he chose to make himself almost invisible. As early as 1959, his second film declares: "A film on this generation will only be a film about the absence of its real creations." Debord was less than 30 years old at the time, and “this generation” was that of the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals, in whose circles he moved. Today, the 1959 projection seems like a prophecy fulfilled, above all concerning Debord's films . His posthumous renown as one of the crucial authors of revolutionary cultural criticism and radical art practice does not mean that his cinematographic oeuvre has been incorporated into the canon. The 3 features and 3 short films, made between 1952 and 1978, remain relatively unknown (partly owing to the author's own decree banning the screening of his films from 1984 on), although this is exactly where his thought as well as his paradoxes are set out in their most condensed form. Six essayistic, powerfully eloquent monuments of cinema "against cinema", shifting between photography, moving image and voice, and fluctuating between rage and melancholy. Works that launch a frontal attack on the political and cultural consensus of the media consumerist society, thereby choosing the mass medium of their era as the weapon – in black and white, to be sure. These are simultaneously "strategic" and "excessive" films; strategic not just in their quotations of Clausewitz, Johnny Guitar , Karl Marx, Children of Paradise and Baltasar Gracián, excessive beyond their continual taking aim at the big picture. They lead their comprehensive attack entirely on the basis of a singular, personal experience.