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Home , Alain Corneau, Classe Tous Risques, Claude Sautet, Jacques Audiard, Notfilm

Press Information September | October 2016

Half a century of modern French crime thrillers and and Buster Keaton 's collaboration of the century in the year of 1965; the politically aware work of documentary filmmaker Helga Reidemeister and the seemingly apolitical "hipster" cinema of the Munich Group between 1965 and 1970: these four topics will launch the 2016/17 season at the Austrian Film Museum.

Furthermore, the Film Museum will once again take part in the Long Night of the Museums (October 1); a new semester of our education program School at the Cinema begins on October 13, and the upcoming publications ( Alain Bergala's book The Cinema Hypothesis and the DVD edition of Josef von Sternberg's The Salvation Hunters ) are nearing completion. Latest Film Museum restorations are presented at significant film festivals – most recently, Karpo Godina's wonderful "film-poems" (1970-72) were shown at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna – the result of a joint restoration project conducted with Slovenska kinoteka.

As the past, present and future of cinema have always been intertwined in our work, we are particularly glad to announce that Michael Palm's new film Cinema Futures will have its world premiere at the on September 2 – the last of the 21 projects the Film Museum initiated on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 2014.

Choice of Arms The French Crime Thriller 1958–2009

To start off the season, the Film Museum presents Part 2 of its retrospective dedicated to French crime cinema. Around 1960, propelled by the growth spurt of the New Wave, the crime film was catapulted from its "classical" period into modernity. As the genre mirroring the state of the nation, its metamorphosis entailed aesthetic, political and cultural changes.

While Jean-Pierre Melville, as figurehead and role model , steered the gangster film towards an absolute "purity", a new generation of directors ranging from François Truffaut to set out to completely revise the traditional genre, transforming it for a younger audience. Father figure Jean Gabin, the epitome of an international superstar à la française , is thereby replaced by new types of masculinity: triumphs as Gabin's gruffer successor, while Jean-Paul Belmondo 's youthful cool secures him (with the possible exception of Alain Delon ) a unique status whose impact on crime film will last decades. A worthy heir doesn't appear until 1980, when Gérard Depardieu enters the genre with a raw ferocity which feeds on the politicization and radical escalation of the genre in the hands of the leading directors of the 1970s (, Yves Boisset, Philippe Labro) and authors such as Jean-Patrick Manchette, who coined the French umbrella term polar .

At the same time, mainstream cinema goes the route of surface tension (as in the action flicks centered around Belmondo), resulting in the Cinéma du look. This trend was epitomized by Jean- Jacques Beineix' Diva in the early eighties and turned into a global brand by ( Nikita ) in the decades to follow. However, unlike the rest of Europe, France successfully held its own against the simultaneous leveling of crime stories under the ever-increasing pressure of television competition, proof of which is found in key works by old masters such as Claude Chabrol ( La

Cérémonie ) as much as in the continuation of the sociological polar tendency, carried into the new millennium by or Éric Valette.

The radical change in French crime thrillers from the late '50s onwards comes on the heels of a fresh, new attitude towards life , fueled by the revolt against the paternalism of the post-war era. Internationally oriented and prone to playful stylization, it runs parallel to the Hollywood- molded New Wave politique des auteurs . The American influence is evident in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless , a radical treatment of gangster film dedicated to the low-budget studio Monogram, as in Truffaut's adaptation of David Goodis' Shoot the Piano Player , or in 's choice of having Miles Davis create the score for Elevator to the Gallows . Alfred Hitchcock becomes a reference point for Truffaut ( The Bride Wore Black with Jeanne Moreau as femme fatale ) as well as veteran René Clément, whose Purple Noon (based on a Patricia Highsmith novel) makes a star of Alain Delon in the role of an amoral killer. Meanwhile, thanks to a radical purification and supreme laconism, the generic polar creates its own modern forms, heralded in Sautet's , starring Ventura and Belmondo, and completed in Melville's masterpieces of the 1960s and early '70s.

A further thrust is provided by the turbulence of May '68 and the subsequent end of the De Gaulle era – a long since defunct symbol of economic and social "stability". While major Chabrol films such as The Butcher laid bare the inner corruption of the bourgeoisie , a left-wing, i.e. anarcho- satirical fraction emerged – a tougher, angrier, sharpened neo-polar , inspired by Jean-Patrick Manchette's crime novels. The pitch-black (also in terms of its humor) Nada , an apogee of Chabrol and Manchette's work, is the ultimate example of 1970s ideological criticism. However, it was Yves Boisset who became the pivotal director of the movement, flanked by anarchists such as Jean- Pierre Mocky ( L’Albatros ) and virtuoso directors like Philippe Labro ( The Inheritor ).

In his deconstructions of the police (Un condé, La Femme flic ) and the law (Judge Fayard Called the Sheriff ), Boisset fuses the power of popular cinema and social protest in an exemplary manner. His masterpiece, the antiracist thriller satire Dupont Lajoie (The Common Man , 1975), touches on a truly sore point: reactions to the inflow of North African immigrants characterize the polar as much as current national affairs. The directors' takes range from 's The Pigsty (1981), a reflection on the colonial era, Maurice Pialat's genre swan song Police (1985) up to 's La Haine (1995). Many crucial tendencies come to a climax in La Haine : Alain Corneau's banlieue analyses in his Série noire and on the margins of Choice of Arms , his apotheosis of the “Melvillian” model; but also cinema's shift towards commercial youth culture in the wake of Beineix and Besson. Still, polar ’s renaissance in the new millennium was not discouraged by these developments: films such as Audiard's , emphasizing the fear of Muslims, or Valette's State Affairs with its leftist fusion of a political thriller and the empowerment of policewomen demonstrate the vitality of the polar tradition in the present.

Dominik Graf , the most significant director of crime thrillers in the German-speaking world, will be a guest at the Film Museum on September 8 and 9 and speak about the French neo- polar. The retrospective has been organized with generous help from the Cinémathèque suisse. August 26 to O ctober 12, 2016

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Kino-Atlas 4 München-Schwabing

"This year the Selection Committee has rejected West German films whose authors dared to take reality into serious consideration," said the pamphlet that was supposed to be distributed at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1965, three years after the famous manifesto. Before long, three young filmmakers who were among the signatories went on to become the core members of the Munich Group and soon brought a new, unrestrained timbre to German cinema: Rudolf Thome, Klaus Lemke and Max Zihlmann . Two other names stood beside theirs, names nowadays associated with an entirely different variety of cinema: Jean-Marie Straub and Peter Nestler.

In the 1960s, as cinema was set in motion all over the world, Germany was no exception. Aesthetic and political borders were constantly on the move, and alliances were broken as quickly as they were established. In this period of upheaval, a kind of undercover New Wave arose in Munich . Breaking away from the pressure towards professionalization they saw in the Oberhauseners, whom they considered to be potential “film officials”, the truly heterogeneous group of young Munich cinephiles created their own film practice, wherein it was of utmost importance that cinema should correspond with the actualities of their own lives. This priority made Straub/Huillet's furious settling of accounts with West Germany ( The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp ) just as desirable as Thome's nonchalant reflection on genre: Jane Shoots John Because He Cheats On Her With Ann .

The loose alliance soon attracted other filmmakers. Among them Bulgarian Marran Gosov, who developed his own, original film poems (above all in short film form); Roger Fritz , who was later to act for Peckinpah and whose feature films, barely acknowledged at the time, now reveal one of the most modern German directors of his time awaiting contemporary rediscovery. Or the director May Spils and her leading actor Werner Enke : the team's first feature Go for It, Baby became the first and only blockbuster of Munich's slacker cinema.

Today’s reflections on the “generation of ‘68” mostly put their politically militant strands at the center. It has proven harder to grasp the broader social changes that the 1960s ushered in or paved the way for: second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution, new popular and especially youth cultures, social tolerance towards alternative lifestyles – to name but a few. In the films of the Munich Group, however, the spirit of '68 is immediately palpable: it does not declare itself in explicit political discourse as much as it does in new forms of speech, life, love, even fashion and pop music, which the films have recorded in an almost documentary manner.

Incidentally, the manifesto composed by Thome, Lemke, Zihlmann, Straub and Nestler was never distributed. Unlike the Oberhauseners, no member of the Munich Group was suited to become a film politician. And their films have aged all the better for it.

September 22 to 26, 2016

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Is this Fate? Helga Reidemeister – In person

Now in its fifth decade, the documentary oeuvre of German filmmaker Helga Reidemeister (*1940) negotiates the intertwinement of what is commonly referred to (and set apart) as the personal and the political . After studying painting and starting out as a social worker in Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel, Reidemeister was already 33 when she began her studies at the dffb. She graduated with her film Is this Fate? (1979). At its core, this film already contains every component of her documentary voice: bringing the individual human being into focus without losing sight of the surrounding political structure ; at the same time telling a story together with rather than about people. Reidemeister often seems like an ally of her protagonists, causing paradigms of objectivity and documentary ethics to fall short in her case: she intervenes from behind the camera, talks to the people, voices her opinion, expresses alternative views, becomes a part of the world before the camera.

In its entirety, her work reads as a project of an alternative German historiography after the Second World War: it is not the "big" topics that come into , but the marginalized discourses. Instead of a patriarchal view of the signs of the times, her perspective is that of a critically thinking woman surveying their side effects: family structures and living conditions of workers in the 1970s, images of women torn between commerce and rebellion in the '80s, the end of the Cold War from the viewpoint of retreating Soviet soldiers in the '90s; penal institutions and life in war-ridden Afghanistan in the new millennium.

Helga Reidemeister will be present as a guest at the Film Museum and hold a workshop on documentary filmmaking at the Friedl Kubelka School. October 5 to 12, 2016

Premiere: Film / Notfilm Samuel Beckett, Buster Keaton,

A "special event" exceptionally worthy of the expression: Notfilm (2015) is the poetic and deeply insightful result of Ross Lipman's year-long research and restoration work on Samuel Beckett, Buster Keaton and their joint short film called Film (1965). The Film Museum will host the Austrian premiere of Notfilm , which will be shown together with a restored version of Film .

From the genius of Beckett to that of Dziga Vertov; from Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Keaton's The Cameraman (1928) to a blisteringly hot film shoot in New York 36 years later, as Keaton and Vertov's brother, cameraman Boris Kaufman, under the guidance of Beckett and director Alan Schneider, concoct one of the most unusual photoplays of all time. Ross Lipman combines all this in his powerful film essay, posing questions on human consciousness in the media-permeated modern age, graced by sensational Beckett documents and a reflection on cinema from its beginnings to the massive changes it is going through today.

Ross Lipman will be present for a Q&A at the Film Museum. October 13, 2016

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Film Selection: Choice of Arms

L’Ascenseur pour l’échafaud 1958, Louis Malle Dupont Lajoie 1975, Yves Boisset Un témoin dans la ville 1959, Édouard Molinaro Peur sur la ville 1975, Henri Verneuil Plein soleil 1960, René Clément Le Juge Fayard dit le Shériff 1977, Yves Boisset À bout de souffle 1960, Jean-Luc Godard Série noire 1979, Alain Corneau Classe tous risques 1960, Claude Sautet La Guerre des polices 1979, Robin Davis Tirez sur le pianiste 1960, François Truffaut La Femme flic 1980, Yves Boisset Le Doulos 1962, Jean-Pierre Melville Garde à vue 1981, Claude Miller Judex 1963, Georges Franju Coup de torchon 1981, Bertrand Tavernier Le Deuxieme souffle 1966, Jean-Pierre Melville Le Choix des armes 1981, Alain Corneau La Mariée était en noir 1967, François Truffaut Diva 1981, Jean-Jacques Beineix Le Samouraï 1967, Jean-Pierre Melville Police 1985, Maurice Pialat Que la bête meure 1969, Claude Chabrol Mauvais sang 1986, Leos Carax Un condé 1970, Yves Boisset Nikita 1990, Luc Besson Le Boucher 1970, Claude Chabrol La Haine 1995, Mathieu Kassovitz L'Étrangleur 1970, Paul Vecchiali La Cérémonie 1995, Claude Chabrol Le Cercle rouge 1970, Jean-Pierre Melville Les Voleurs 1996, André Téchiné L’Albatros 1971, Jean-Pierre Mocky Feux rouges 2004, Cédric Kahn 1971, Claude Sautet Le Petit lieutenant 2005, Xavier Beauvois Un homme est mort 1972, De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté 2005, Jacques Audiard L'Héritier 1973, Philippe Labro Un prophète 2009, Jacques Audiard Nada 1974, Claude Chabrol Une affaire d'état 2009, Éric Valette

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

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