ALPINE DESIRE FILM SERIES
MARCH and APRIL 2011
In conjunction with the exhibition, Alpine Desire, which was on view through May 8, 2011, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York presented a three-part alpine-themed film series. A cooperation with the Austrian Film Museum and curated by Michael Loebenstein, the film series featured restored gems from the silent movie era as well as rarely seen contemporary films. Just like the exhibition, the films examined the various desires associated with and the abysses hiding behind the cultural-historical subject of the Alps and the "alpine," and underscored the exhibition's theme of beauty and horror often existing side by side, and the fact that the sublime can conceal nightmares.
The Alpine Desire Film Series opened with Erich von Stroheim's Hollywood debut, Blind Husbands (1919). Considered a masterpiece of American silent cinema and set in the alpine scenery of South Tyrol, it still baffles today's audiences with its precise visual language and its moral ambiguity. Austrian émigré von Stroheim uses the alpine backdrop, which was actually filmed in California, as a symbol for his protagonist's erotic desires and as an arena for a post-World War I stand-off between 'old world' decadence and American pragmatism. The copy shown at the Austrian Cultural Forum is the longest and oldest version available today: This 100-minute, gorgeously tinted 1921 Austrian release was restored by the Austrian Film Museum in 2006.
The Alpine Desire Film Series continued with The Rapture of the Alps, a selection of two contemporary Austrian experimental shorts and a recently rediscovered silent travelogue. The short films shared an emphasis on the Alps as a sublime place of yearning as well as a fascination with the potential of cinema to playfully unlock their grandeur. Siegfried Fruhauf's Höhenrausch (1999) is a cinematic tour de force constructed with hundreds of Austrian postcards, ironically reflecting on the commercialization of nature. Elke Groen's NightStill (2008) is a filmic survey of the Austrian Dachstein region, shot with a clockwork-driven film camera over the duration of two winters. The time-lapse photography is as awe-inspiring as it is uncanny—an alien landscape showered by stars and buried in snow. A Motorcycle Trip Among the Clouds (1926) is a travel documentary directed by Austrian news and sports photographer Lothar Ruebelt. Shot on location in the Dolomites, where Erich von Stroheim's Blind Husbands was situated, Ruebelt's film is a noteworthy example of the 'mountain frenzy,' which gripped Europe in the 1920s and 1930s and sparked organized mountain tours, the construction of motorways across the Alps as well as the 'Bergfilm' (Mountain film) genre. At 56 minutes, the copy presented is the shorter, albeit colorized, version of this rare film preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.
Elke Groen's Night Still (2008)
Darker shades of mountain life come to the fore in Stefan Ruzowitzky's surprise hit, The Inheritors (1998), a clever, postmodern take on the 'Heimatfilm' and 'Bergfilm' genres of the 1930s and the 1950s. Set in a little farming valley in 1930s rural Upper Austria the Oscar-winning director of The Counterfeiters (2007) infuses the genre with the anxieties of higher elevations: isolation, oppression and the patriarchal society. When one of the farmers is found murdered one day the farm workers—treated as mere slaves until then—inherit the whole farm, much to the dislike of the powerful landowners. The award-winning film was shown in its original German with English subtitles.
Trailer for Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Inheritors (1998)
Vienna-based Irish musician Elaine Brennan accompanied the silent film screenings on piano. She has been engaged by numerous universities, orchestras, broadcasters, chamber groups, and soloists, and has accompanied numerous silent films on piano, most recently the major works of directors DW Griffith, Howard Hawks, and Ozu Yasujiro.
