Ron Holloway, Berlin, 30 March 2006
Over the past year, the Diagonale in Graz (not to be confused with the Viennale in Vienna) has prospered under the light hand of Birgit Flos and her capable team to become an indispensable showcase of Austrian films. Indeed, this national film event offers its public just about everything of visual quality in Austrian cinema and video, from shorts to documentaries, from old and new features to international coproductions, from avant-garde experimental films to television programming. And with festival purses totaling circa Euro 120,000, few filmmakers are likely to bypass the visible rewards offered at the Sixth Diagonale
(21-26 March 2006).
Even foreign guests turned out in greater numbers than ever before, despite the caveat that some knowledge of the native dialect is highly recommended.
Diagonale 2006 opened with the world premiere of Florian Flicker’s No Name City, an amusing documentary about a Western theme park located just 30 miles outside of Vienna. The park has everything a West fan could wish for: cowboys, cowgirls, horses, saloon, gun-fights, Indians, even an old-style train on tracks attacked by outlaws on horseback. Founded five years ago, the citizen of this “No Name City” have had to struggle to keep a dream alive despite changing owners and a meager income that can guaranteed only during the summer months. The evening was topped by the popular “Sunshine Kid,” a local Country-&-Western entertainer in jeans and stetson with a bevy of guitar tunes to last him through the night. Another sellout was the world premiere of Helmut Köpping’s Kotsch, a feature film whose title (“kotsch” means “killing time”) says everything. Nothing much happens in this rural Styrian town, save for the shenanigans that go on nightly in the local bar. Another crowd-pleaser was the single screening of Raoul Ruiz’s Klimt, an Austrian-German-British-French coproduction, if only because this “director’s cut” (129 minutes) offered the public a heavy dose of “erotic phantasmagoria” drawn freely from the life and times of the notorious Austrian painter Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). Klimt – played by John Malkovich, a Ruiz regular – is depicted as a renegade, whose penchant for portraits of lush sensuality both scandalized and provoked.
As expected, the Diagonale Grand Prize for Best Feature Film went to Austrian cult director Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden). The Austrian-French-British-Italian coproduction by had already been awarded Best Director at the 2005 Cannes festival, in addition to receiving there the FIPRESCI (International Critics) and Ecumenical Prizes. More of a psychogram than a psycho-thriller, in which the victim is also the perpetrator, the hidden secret in this intellectual game is harbored by a noted literary guru on French television, who has received a menacing videotape that could only have come from a person who knows him like a book. Just as deserving for the Grand Prize, however, was Jasmila Zbanic’s Grbavica, winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale. An Austrian coproduction with Bosnia and Herzegovina, with funding coming as well from Germany and Croatia, Grbavica is a deeply moving film of social conscience about the agony of Muslim women raped by Serb nationalists during the four-year siege (1992-95) of Sarajevo. It received a Special Mention at Graz.
With Austrian documentaries currently riding a wave of festival popularity and international recognition, the jury for the Best Austrian Documentary Film had its work cut out for it. Not surprisingly, the Grand Prize was split between two worthy entries: Aresh’s Exile Family Movie, and Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s Babooska, an Austrian-Italian coproduction that had already been awarded the prestigious Wolfgang Staudte Prize at the International Forum of New Cinema during this year’s Berlinale. Both films are remarkable for social content and political depth. In Aresh’s Exile Family Movie a large Iranian family arrange to meet secretly in Saudi Arabia after a long separation. Since some members of the family live in political exile in Europe and America, the only way to have the desired reunion is to mutually book a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. The contrasts between the cultures make for both drama and humor.
In Covi and Frimmel’s Babooska the route of modern nomads, members of a small traveling circus, is traced through villages in northern Italy over the stretch of a year. Along the way, Babooska Giradi, the young artiste in the troupe, looks after the needs of her younger sister as best she can while not performing or handling other chores. A poetic documentary, one that sketches circus life as it is without distracting commentary. A third outstanding documentary, Michael Glawogger’s Working Man’s Death, arrived at Graz with a round of festivals that began with Venice last year. Nine years in the making, and shot in five corners of the globe, Workingman’s Death has been rightly hailed as a creative tour-de-force on the plight of the working man in the 21st century. Its producer, Lotus Film, shared the purse of the Producer’s Prize at the Diagonale, while cameraman Wolfgang Thaler was awarded the Diagonale Prize for Best Cinematography on a documentary film.
This year, the Diagonale honored actress Elisabeth Bergner and Canadian independent filmmaker John Cook with retrospective tributes. Both would be major events on any festival calendar, while here in Graz they were just reminders of the broad spectrum of cinematic expression that has emerged from Vienna over the past century. In her time, Elisabeth Bergner (1897-1986) was the intellectual sex symbol of a sophisticated Europe. Born in Austria, her stage career was made in Vienna and Berlin, particularly when Max Reinhardt persuaded her to come to Berlin in 1932 to play Rosalind in his production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, a role cut to her personality. Forced to emigrate to London a year later, this became her second theatrical home for most of the next 50 years, although she did try to conquer Hollywood and New York during the war years, only to find that her public had been left behind in Europe.
The core of the Bergner tribute at Graz were the film classics directed by her husband, fellow Austrian Paul Czinner. They included Fräulein Else (Germany, 1929), a silent Schnitzler adaptation in which she is compromised to strip naked; Ariane (Germany, 1931), in which she plays a coy Russian girl; and Stolen Life (UK, 1939), in which she subtly interprets both sides of a good-sister, bad-sister relationship (Bette Davis starred in the 1947 Hollywood remake). Naturally, there were packed houses every morning at 11 in the Augartenkino arthouse.
The other half of the Diagonale retrospective paid homage to a neglected and forgotten John Cook (1935-2001). Back in the heady 1970s, this Toronto-born, Vienna-based photographer-filmmaker-writer had lit a fire under Austrian cinema with his rambling brand of fragmented narrative reminiscent of Italian neorealism, the French nouvelle vague, and Ricky Leacock’s direct-cinema aesthetics. Sometimes referred to as the “Canadian Kerouac,” John Cook was already a recognized magazine photographer when he arrived by chance in Vienna in 1972, learned some German to go with his sputtering French, and stayed for a decade until 1982. During this time, he made five remarkable, independently financed feature films on a shoestring, three of which were programmed in the retrospective.
John Cook’s first Viennese feature, Ich schaff’s einfach nimmer (I’ll Never Make It) (1973), sketches the short career of a gypsy boxer until his first big fight and the knockout that abruptly ended his career. Langsamer Sommer (Slow Summer) (1976), shot originally on Super-8 stock and then transferred to 35mm with the sound synched-in from a tape-recorder, is little more than an improvised chronicle of a hot and lazy summer during which John Cook and his friends wander around Vienna and the countryside. And Schwitzkasten (1978), the most ambitious of his projects, is based loosely on an Austrian novel about a man who is a complete bust in nearly everything he tries, yet is always ready for another bout with fate. Although John Cook’s films appear on the surface to be pure improvisation, with the camera rolling only when the money was there, they are eye-catchers for their spontaneity and droll approach to life’s ups and downs. And in Slow Summer there are some telling scenes in which the director stutters his way through a make-believe autobiographical account of his own life, harking back to his youth in Toronto.
Diagonale Awards
Grand Prize, Best Austrian Feature Film
Caché (Hidden), dir Michael Haneke
Special Mentions
Spiele Leben (You Bet Your Life) (Austria/Switzerland), dir Antonin Svoboda
Grbavica (Austria/Bosnia&Herzegovina/Germany/Croatia), dir Jasmila Zbanic
Schläfer (The Sleeper) (Austria/Germany), dir Benjamin Heisenberg
Grand Prize, Best Austrian Documentary Film – ex aequo
Babooska (Austria/Italy), dir Tizza Covi, Rainer Frimmel
Exile Family Movie, dir Aresh
Special Mentions
Unter den Bretten hellgrünes Grass (Bright Green Grass Under the Boards), dir Karin Berger
Reisen im eigenen Zimmer – Der Schriftsteller Gerhard Amanshauser (Journeys in One’s Own Room – The Writer Gerhard Amanshauser), dir Bernhard Braunstein
Prize for Innovative Cinema – ex aequo
chronomops, dir Tina Frank
int.16/ 45// son01/ 30x1, dir lia
Eine Million Credit ist normal, sagt mein Grossvater (One Million Credit Is Normal, says My Grandfather), dir Gabriele Mathes
Prize of Jury of Graz-Sechau Diocese
Artgenossen – 35 Minutenporträts (Austrian Artists – 35 Minute Portraits), dir Sepp Dreissinger
Special Mention
Julia – wozu Familie (Julia - Why Family), dir Axel Traun
Diagonale Prize of Youth Jury
STADTUTOPIEN oder die Legende von Synia (City Utopia, or The Legend of Synia), dir Anna Martinetz
Special Mention
on(e)line life – play hard, go pro, documentary, dir Paul Meschuh
accelerated lines, experimental film, dir Manuel Knapp
Best Cinematography
Feature Film: Martin Gschlacht, Spiele Leben (You Bet Your Life), dir Antonin Svoboda
Documentary: Wolfgang Thaler, Working Man’s Death, dir Michael Glawogger
Best Film Editor Prize – Association of Film and Video Editors
Nina Kusturica, Bernhard Schmid, Kotsch, dir Helmut Köpping
Editor of the Year – Documentary
Dieter Pichler
Carl Mayer Screenplay Prizes
Main Prize: Immer nie am Meer (My Folly), Thomas Weingartner
Grant Prize: Ildiko, Lilly Jäckl
Special Mention
Treatment: Commandante Casanova, Wolfgang Weidinger
Prize for Best TV Treatment
Magda’s Dilemma, Susanne Rendel
Thomas Pluch Screenplay Prizes
Slumming, Michael Glawogger
Her mit dem schönen Leben, Johanna Moder, Pia Hierzegger
Heaven, David Schalko
Producers Prizes
Allegro Film – We Feed the World, dir Erwin Wagenhofer
Lotus Film – Working Man’s Death, dir Michael Glawogger
Erich-Neuberg-Prize of ORF – Best TV Directors
Alfred Dorfer, David Schalko, Dorfers Donnerstalk