Innovative Film Austria 12/13

limits. Another example of the deliberate exploration of images and sound in the
digital age is Michael Palm’s feature-length film essay, Low Definition Control –
Malfunctions #0. Palm’s ‘school of seeing’ focuses on computer-aided imaging
devices as they are used in urban non-places and in medicine, focusing on the
visual appropriation of the human body in public space. Palm freely and associatively
translates his subject matter into an unfinished quest. Expert voices here
do not embody the truth but are placed erratically out-of-field. While the film’s
main interest is in the changing technologies for measuring and monitoring urban
life, it also is an option to – in a wide-screen (1:2.35) black-and-white format –
present reality in a condensed form.
If hybrid forms are another feature of innovation in Austrian film, this is not only
true for areas where ‘realistic’ images and forms of abstraction meet but also
for the zone between the given and the staged. Anja Salomonowitz, for instance,
sets almost all of her films in this in-between space. Her Die 727 Tage ohne
Karamo is a stylized and theatrical stock-taking of the Austrian authorities’ treatment
of so-called non-EU nationals. Using alienation effects, such as the deliberate
decoupling of sound and image, the film subverts identity clichés as well as
the conventions of TV documentaries. Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel also rely on
forms of theatricality. In their feature, The Shine of Day, they create ‘true’ stories
by working with protagonists whose life is part of their film role.
The stage here forms the basis for a dramaturgy aimed at looking behind the
curtain. The encounter of a stage actor in his prime and an aging showman
highlights two different practices of illusion. The veristic moments of the narration
are off-camera, in the film’s empty spaces. A new space evolves in which life
can be negotiated as the basis of drama.
Many Austrian films that deal with social taboos are situated in the conflict
between repulsion and attraction, between reason and emotion. Outing,
Sebastian Meise’s and Thomas Reider’s portrait of a pedophile based on many
years of research for a fiction film project, does not cater to such an esthetics
of disgust. The film is not out to provoke but aimed at mobilizing a discourse on
sexuality, not unlike the dispositive of a confessionary. If a documentary keeps
revolving around figurations of physical materiality and actions, as in Veronika
Franz’ und Severin Fiala’s Kern, the portrait of the eccentric film and theater
12 >13 Introduction