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SPECIAL PROGRAMS Realities An Archeology of Early Austrian Documentary Cinema Expeditions into the pioneering years of cinema inevitably lead to terra incognita due to its fragmentary state of preservation. Thus, all the extant materials are important reference points for an initial survey of the fascinating cosmos of early moving images. Presented as part of the Viennale 2013, the Filmarchiv program “Realities” provides the first compact overview of the early history of Austrian documentary cinema. Many of the films are a more than 100 years old, taking us back to the time of the fin de siècle, the last years of the Habsburg monarchy. The first documentary filmmakers are confronted with a changing world: speed, acceleration, electrification, the rise of mass media and new social forces, such as the women’s and labor movement, urbanization and the emerging globalization of all spheres of life characterized a period, which radically broke with the past, steering towards an uncertain future. These realities of a world out of joint form the historico-cultural framework of the cinematographic appropriation of reality. The film program retraces ideas, approaches, and, ultimately, the self-conception of the documentarians, revealing the tracks of Austrian film pioneers’ earliest attempts of rendering the world in moving images. The programs include a large number of newly restored films, which will be accompanied by the contemporary live music of renowned Austrian and international musicians. A Filmarchiv Austria program, curated by Ernst Kieninger, Nikolaus Wostry and Karl Wratschko. Wild Ethnography The Work of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab Within a few years, a department at Harvard University in Boston, USA, has become one of the most interesting and exciting production facilities for current documentary cinema in the world. The so-called Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), however, is not a department for classic documentary film in the strict sense of the word, but rather an open place for cinematographic research and experiments. It is a seismographic laboratory of images and sounds that has largely distanced itself from conventional documentary practices and ethnographic ideas, creating its own, fascinating cosmos of audiovisual productions. The Viennale is the first international festival to dedicate a special program to SEL, documenting the wide variety and sensory fascination of this lab’s various working methods and productions. In recent years, several films created in Harvard have attracted great international attention and received a number of prizes, including SWEETGRASS by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, FOREIGN PARTS by Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki, LEVIATHAN by Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and, most recently, Stephanie Spray’s and Pacho Velez’s MANAKAMANA, which was awarded a Golden Leopard at the 2013 Locarno Film Festival. From the rural work with flocks of sheep to the micro-economics of spare-part car dealership in Brooklyn, from industrial fishing to pilgrimage traditions in Nepal – the realities and worlds that SEL films devote themselves to and explore are as rich, surprising and multi-faceted as the sensory approaches and specific cinematic work of the filmmakers themselves. Asian Delights Examples of a New Asian Genre Cinema in 3D While the feeling is that the 3D boom in Hollywood has almost passed its zenith, Asia is still approaching 3D with a far more open mind. A small, but spectacular midnight program of the Viennale 2013 will present six current 3D films, which were well received in their respective countries of origin. The legend of the cheeky monkey king Sun Wukong, who takes on the powers of heaven, has been filmed in the Chinese cultural sphere numerous times in the past. The imaginative animated cartoon THE MONKEY KING: UPROAR IN HEAVEN (DA NAO TIAN GONG, 1961/1964) by Su Da and Chen Zhihong is regarded as the most famous version. In 2012 this classic was completely restored and adapted to 3D. The tremendous box-office success of JOURNEY TO THE WEST: CONQUERING THE DEMONS (XI YOU XIANG MO PIAN, 2013), directed by Hong Kong’s star comedian Stephen Chow, proves the undiminished popularity of the subject matter.
Hong Kong’s 3D production also draws on the city’s rich cinematic legacy. Andrew Lau (INFERNAL AFFAIRS) shot a remake of a Shaw Brothers classic from the year 1979, entitled THE GUILLOTINES (XUE DI ZI, 2012), which is both an action-packed and philosophical parable about an imperial élite unit that becomes enmeshed in the wheels of history. Stephen Fung’s TAI CHI HERO (TAIJI YINGXIONG JUEQI, 2012) picks up the thread of his action film TAI CHI ZERO. Vikram Bhatt, the grandson of film pioneer Vijay Bhatt, shot the first Indian 3D film with HAUNTED (2011), scoring great success with his story about a haunted house. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the program is the sword-combat 3D film THE LADY ASSASSIN (MY NHAN KE, 2013) by Nguyen Quang Dung – a spectacular example of Vietnamese action cinema, which is absolutely unknown in this part of the world. Curated by Andreas Ungerböck and Leo Moser. The Geography of the Labyrinth Tih-Minh and Out 1 – Two Great Serials of the History of Cinema by Louis Feuillade and Jacques Rivette “TV is better than the movies” has recently been a recurring argument in view of new, innovative and primarily American TV formats. This refers to a number of US television serials, which for the past ten years have been venerated like a kind of cult by critics, connoisseurs and selected audiences alike. Indeed, actual “sophisticated communities” have been established around individual series, and these news forms have also found their way into the program of film festivals. Of course, the characteristic feature of these formats lies in their nature of succession, continuation – essentially in the serial as such. Revolving around this idea of the serial, which is as old as the history of cinema, is a double program of this year’s Viennale. It consists of two unconventional as well as central examples – two moments, in which cinema reinvents itself in its continuation. The first is the almost seven-hour, twelve-episode serial TIH-MINH (1918) by Louis Feuillade, a production that has always been overshadowed by his legendary LES VAMPIRES, but is probably the director’s richest and most mature work. And the second is Jacques Rivette’s mysterious film fleuve OUT1: NOLI ME TANGERE, an unparalleled twelve-hour cinematic daydream in eight episodes that has hardly ever been shown in its entirety. Both are fantastic stories of amnesia, paranoia and conspiracy; both reveal exorbitant parallel worlds of collapsing collectives, dissolving certainties and labyrinthine tales. According to Jonathan Rosenbaum, the one is the bourgeoisie’s attempt at self-reflection following the horrors of the First World War, the other the reflection of bohemian society after the shattered hopes of 1968. Two major, magnificent film serials, connected underground over half a century. Cinema as the better cinema. The Raw and the Boiled Five Positions of Independent Experimental Cinema Last year, the Viennale introduced a compiled special program, consisting of mainly avant-garde works by a number of female directors, from the Argentinean doyenne Narcisa Hirsch to the young French filmmaker Mati Diop. This interesting and successful program format will be continued this year with five further positions of experimental, independent cinema of greatly varying moments, which, however, are linked through their political and aesthetic relevance, and, above all, through their conscious and reflective dealing with cinematic footage and its implications. The program ranges from political montage and agitation films by the late († 2003) Afro-Cuban director Nicolás Guillén Landrián, who was partly ostracized in Cuba, to the completely independent, playful experiments with space, time and movement by the young Austrian filmmaker Johann Lurf. From the subtle feminist abstractions of the American Jennifer Reeder to the pure playing and experimentation with cinematic dispositives in the form of actionist interventions by the artist duo Gibson/Recode. And, finally, there’s the fascinating, minimalist spatial surveying by filmmaker Claudia Larcher, movements between mathematical abstraction and cinematographic frenzy. “The Raw and the Boiled” of cinema is not so much the sum of the cinematic works presented here, but rather an example of the multi-faceted, individual artistic and aesthetic practices, which are loosely and temporarily connected in this program of the Viennale 2013.
Page 1 and 2: PROGRAMPRESENTATION OCTOBER 24-NOVE
Page 3 and 4: VIENNALE 2013 OCTOBER 24 TO NOVEMBE
Page 5 and 6: adical Spanish director Gonzalo Gar
Page 7: to systematic gambling. Casino Vien

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