Viennale 2023 Roundup

I skipped this year’s Viennale opening film, Explanation for Everything (Gabor Reisz) to watch Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon which was released on the same evening across Vienna, and watched it again on the last day of the festival.

Set in 1920-30s America about settler colonialism, entitlement, greed and the systematic murder of members of the Osage tribe for their oil rich land, I didn’t expect it to speak to news of the genocide that was going on in Gaza that week (and still continues as I write this). I was already feeling heavy-hearted because of the news and watching this film set the tone for my film festival experience.

Being in a city that felt removed from what’s happening in Gaza and with no display of public support as seen in other cities around the world, I found it difficult to be in my usual film festival mood. Apart from discussions with a couple of other friends at the festival trying to process the news, I unexpectedly found films from this year’s line up (new and old) that helped me contextualise the current news, and confirms yet again, as sung by Talking Heads that it’s the “same as it ever was”.

 

In Bushman (David Schickele, 1971), a fictional docudrama about Gabriel (Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam), a young Nigerian drama student who flees to San Francisco for a better life - where he experiences interracial romance and American counterculture, but also treated or gazed upon as an exotic creature from Africa at best, or dehumanised due to institutionalised racism at worst. Made during a time of social upheaval in both Nigeria and America, an unexpected turn of events in Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam’s real life effected the ending of the film. “Truth was not stranger than fiction, just a little faster”. 

Life of a Shock Force Worker (Bahrudin Bato Čengić, 1972) is set in the early post war years of socialist Yugoslavia and inspired by real life coal miners who were treated as national heroes and glorified as “shock workers”. Subversive in its absurdity and irony, it presents us with the reality of their grim labour conditions and poor financial conditions. A display of public heroism serving the country, that actually serves the country’s political agenda, and their self-awareness of this facade is resentful and tragic.

In Chile, The Obstinate Memory (Patricio Guzman, 1997) Guzman returns to Chile for the first time in 23 years and documents the collective trauma and memories of the military coup of September 11,1973 (which ended in 1988). He brings with him his 3-part documentary The Battle of Chile that chronicled the tension and violence leading to the coup, which was shown at film festivals around the world but never in his home country. Showing it to friends, some of whom are survivors of the coup, and students who were born after the coup or too young to know or understand what was going on at the time, the film documents their reactions, some revisiting suppressed memories, others in complete shock and tears to learn about hidden truths. Narrated by Guzman, it’s a film about his personal reexamination of the past as well, and a new generation’s confrontation of an unknown history.

James Baldwin says “America is the government of the world” in I Heard it Through the Grapevine (Pat Hartley & Dick Fontaine, 1982), a sentiment that remains true till this day. Revisiting sights of the Civil Rights Movement almost two decades later, including Atlanta, Birmingham, Selma, Philadelphia, Mississippi, the Newark riots in New Jersey and the battleground beaches of St. Augustine in Florida, Baldwin speaks to activists, writers and community members and shares his thoughts and observations too. Despite small changes and progress, and despite hope for a better future, much remains the same, whether in the 1980s or today. “What happened to those who did not die, but whose lives were smashed on Freedom Road.”

A hopeful yet short lived example of civil rights in the form of self governance happened in Allensworth, a town founded in 1908 as the first municipality in California that was self-governed by African Americans. Today it stands as Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park, a site of restored buildings. This isn’t evident when you start watching Allensworth (James Benning, 2023), an hour long film comprised of 12 scenes, each a static shot lasting five minutes. Silent except for the sound of the wind or a passing train. Later in the film we hear the songs Blackbird by Nina Simone, In the Pines by Huddie Ledbetter, and a student reading poems by Lucille Clifton. An experience of durational cinema looking at buildings of homes, churches, libraries, and gravestones - a haunting unravelling of a history and a society that is no longer there.
I later learned from this piece titled The History of Allensworth, California (1908-) by Robert Mikell, the town thrived till the 1925, but with the lack of irrigation water, the population dwindled soon after. “Irrigation water was never delivered in sufficient supply as promised by the Pacific Farming Company, the land development firm that handled the original purchase.  As a result, town leaders were engrossed in lengthy and expensive legal battles with Company, expending scarce financial resources on a battle they would not win.”

Another sight of layered history appears in El Chinero, A Phantom Hill (Bani Khoshnoudi, 2023), where Khoshnoudi visits El Chinero, an isolated hill in the Mexicali region of Mexico near the US border. In 1916, a massive exodus of Chinese and Asian migrants took place, escaping deportation and violence after settling in Mexico for decades, but many were never able to cross the border. Filmed on 16mm, it acts as a remembrance of the unrecorded deaths and disappearances, and of a violent landscape.

The Old Oak (Ken Loach, 2023) is set in a small town in north-eastern England in 2016, the year of the Brexit referendum. A small town and population that is in economic decline ignored by the government receives new Syrian refugees to be housed there, dropped off by the same government. Not everyone is welcoming, and The Old Oak, the only remaining pub and public space becomes a space of tension and prejudice. Friendships are tested, but also unexpected acts of support and community to bring people together. A blunt and unabashed film about despair, inequality, governmental neglect, empathy and humanity. I was not the only one wiping my tears in the cinema. 

I don’t think we expected Jean-Luc Godard’s last film would be a “trailer”. A Saint Laurent production, Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars” (Jean-Luc Godard, 2023) is made of collages on photo paper that act as references and notes for a for a film that he realised he won’t be able to make, an adaptation of the 1937 novel Faux Passports by the Belgian author Charles Plisnier. He sent these collages with instructions to his assistant to make the trailer. It includes narration by him, and audio from his earlier films - memory, history, politics and music intertwined. One line from the trailer stood out, “…because of Palestine. I wanted to see a place where reconciliation is possible.”

 


Four new films from the festival that examined cinema as a marker for memory and history:

Radu Jude describes his latest film Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World as a “fragmentary film (part comedy, part road movie, part montage film, part camera based film) about work, exploitation, death and the new gig economy”. It is also about manipulation of images and truths.

The film has two timelines, one set in 1981 with scenes from the film Angela Moves On (Lucian Bratu) about Angela (Dorina Lazar) making ends meet as a taxi driver in Bucharest, under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaucescu, and present day Bucharest about Angela (Ilinca Manolache) a production assistant for a company that makes commercials and corporate videos. She works 16hrs a day most of it spent in her car in traffic listening to dance music and consuming energy drinks to keep her alert, constantly hustling or arguing to get things done. Her latest gig is trying to cast someone for a ‘safety at work’ video for a multinational Austrian company. She also has an obnoxious online alter ego, Bobita - a satirical character modelled after Andrew Tate. She films herself using filters that make her look bald with facial hair whenever she has a few minutes to spare and feeling inspired to broadcast expletives and toxic commentary to her social media followers, and an outlet for her to vent.

Present day Angela’s records her individual interviews with potential cast (including a much older Dorina Lazar) for the corporate video, people suffering from disabilities because of workplace accidents who admit they are at fault instead of unsafe work conditions, to get a small sum as a financial reward if they get selected for the video and if they stick to that story. An online meeting via Zoom (Dubai gets a mention) between the production company their client, Nina Hoss as Dorian Goethe dominating the screen looking like a corporate overlord discussing coldly action points for the safety video that needs to be made. 

Scenes of 1980s Angela show us her putting up with sleazy and misogynistic customers, and scenes of a city that shows poverty amidst grand scale architecture. 
Two films in dialogue with each other, a funny and scathing commentary about social conditions and capitalism that only benefits those in power, and a sobering final chapter.


Close Your Eyes (Víctor Erice) is another film within a film set in two different periods, starting in 1990 when a fictional actor Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado) disappears during the filming of a fictitious film set in 1947, The Farewell Gaze. In 2012, that film’s director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) and a friend of Arenas who never made a film after is contacted by producers of a true crime TV show called Unresolved Cases to interview him and to make a show about the mystery of the disappearance. Arenas is eventually found, but as a man who has lost his memory.
A melancholic and moving film that is self-referential, and about the passage of time, absence, and cinema as a time capsule. 
I too would have penned an angry letter to Thierry Fremaux for not including this film in the Competition section at Cannes when it premiered in May.)


Pictures of Ghosts (Kleber Mendonça Filho) is a film essay about the director’s own filmography and his relationship to his home city Recife in Brazil where he developed his love of cinema and became a filmmaker. It’s also a personal history of the cinemas in Recife which had a thriving cinema culture in the 1970s and 80s before the city changed to a commercial and tourist hot spot.

Another film essay, Celluloid Underground (Ehsan Khoshbakht) is about Ahmad Jurghanian - a film collector in Iran and a friend of Khosbakht who amassed a collection of Iran’s pre 1979 cinema heritage including reels, posters, ephemera, hidden from the state to save them from being destroyed if fallen into their hands. It’s also about the directors own experience growing up as a cinephile in post 1979 Iran. He actively screened films wherever he could and ran a film club that came with risks - one scene shows an audience member denouncing the screening of The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969) - the director and his wife were murdered on in their home in Iran in October 14, a few days before the start of the festival. Melancholic compared to the nostalgia in Pictures of Ghosts, it is about obsession and sacrifice to hold on to the past and about learning to let go.

 

Other favourites from the festival:

  • About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

  • Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)

  • The Boy and Heron (Hayao Miyazaki)

  • The Nature of Love (Mania Chokri)

  • La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)

  • Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger)

  • The Taste of Things (Trần Anh Hùng)

  • Zinzindurrunkarratz (Oskar Alegria)

 

Films I rewatched after first seeing them at other festivals:

  • The Beast (Bertrand Bonello)

  • Mal Viver (João Canijo)


Films people liked more than me:

  • Raul Ruiz retrospective, I watched 3 films only

  • L’Amour Four (Jacques Rivette, 1969, new restoration) - but it was nice to see Radu Jude in attendance.


Wish I skipped:

  • The Feeling The The Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow)


Didn’t expect to see:

  • Viennale Trailer 2021: But Why? by Terence Davies, it was shown before the screening of Following the Sound (Kyoshi Sugita). It was in the same cinema I saw him speak in 2021. Made me tear up. RIP Terence Davies.

 

Post screening discussions I enjoyed:

 

Happy to watch films in:

  • Gartenbaukino

  • Metro, Historischer Saal

Also liked being in Urania, but didn’t get a chance to photograph this theatre.

 

List of all films I watched at Viennale 2023:

CINEMATOGRAPHY: RESISTANCE, MEMORY, REINVENTION
Chile Obstinate Memory

MONOGRAPHY: NICOLAS KLOTZ AND ELISABETH PERCEVAL
The Bengali Night

HISTORIOGRAPHY: JAMES BALDWIN
I Heard it Through the Grapevine

HISTORIOGRAPHY: DAVID SCHICKELE
Bushman

Retrospective: Raul Ruiz
Klimt
On Top of the Whale
Savage Souls

SPECIAL:JACQUES RIVETTE
L’amour Fou

SHORTS: COSTA_GODARD_SNOW
The Daughters of Fire
Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars”
Wavelength

SHORT FILM PROGRAMME: VISIBILITIES
Trouble
Sensitive Content
Bloom
El Chinero, A Phantom Hill

FEATURES
About Dry Grasses
Anatomy of a Fall 
Allensworth
The Beast
Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry
The Boy and Heron
Celluloid Underground
Close Your Eyes
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
The Feeling The The Time for Doing Something Has Passed
Following the Sound
Forms of Forgetting
The Human Surge
La Chimera
Lakeside Camping
Life of a Shock Force Worker (1972)
Mal Viver
Monster
The Nature of Love
Only the River Flows
Pictures of Ghosts
Robot Dreams
The Shadowless Tower
The Taste of Things
Zinzindurrunkarratz

Surprise Film
The Old Oak

Viennale Trailers
Viennale Trailer 2023 by Pedro Costa
Viennale Trailer 2021: But Why? by Terence Davies 

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