Innovative Film Austria 10/11

Austrian fictions – often with a pronounced transnational focus, because of coproduction
financing – also dwell in an artful, open ambiguity. Patric Chiha’s
Domaine is about the fluidity of ages, behaviours, genders and social roles,
especially in the erotic realm, pitting modern sensibilities against a 1950s-style
melodramatic framework. And finally, La Pivellina by Tizza Covi and Rainer
Frimmel, with its well-judged nod to the Dardennes in Belgium, uses a realist
manner in order to explore what it means for people – children, the unemployed,
various non-citizens on the margins – to be without a recognized identity,
excluded but strangely free …
And is this not the extraordinary fate of all progressive cinema today, and
certainly so in the splendid example of Austria: caught up in the endless struggle
for acknowledgement, yet happy for some free space and time in which to invent
the art, and the world, of tomorrow?
Melbourne, September 2010
Associate Professor Adrian Martin is Head of Film and Television Studies,
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of five books
and hundreds of book chapters, magazine essays and film reviews. He co-edited
the journal Rouge for seven years, as well as the book Movie Mutations (British
Film Institute 2003).