- Three Paths to the Lake
AUSTRIAN WRITERS ON FILM
by Judith Gruber
Since last July, the Austrian Cultural Forum has been actively collaborating with the Anthology Film Archives, an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video located in the Lower East Side in Manhattan. The collaboration started last season with a successful launch and rave reviews by focusing on Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl. This year’s new series is devoted to an equally interesting subject: the intersection of Austrian literature and cinema, featuring films written by and adapted from renowned Austrian novelists, dramatists, poets, and other writers.
In Three Paths to the Lake, Michael Haneke alters one of Ingeborg Bachmann’s stories about a war photographer who faces a moral crisis when she is forced to examine the implications of her work. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann was enormously influential in Europe for her fiction, poems, and essays on feminism, philosophy, language, and postwar politics. With the movie Young Torless by Austrian director Volker Schlöndorff, we get to see the filmmaker’s debut in script writing and directing from 1966. Faithfully based on Robert Musil’s novel, Schlöndorff’s film is a detailed study of sadism and masochism among students at an Austro-Hungarian boy’s academy, and offers brilliant insight into the inhumanity and dehumanization of military systems. Finally, Axel Corti’s A Woman’s Pale Blue Handwriting from 1984 is based on a novella by the Jewish author, playwright, and poet Franz Werfel - a contemporary and colleague of Franz Kafka. It tells the story of a happily married government official in mid-1930s Austria who receives an unsettling letter that plunges him into an ethical crisis.
Our second focus puts a spotlight on Austrian documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter with a retrospective of his most interesting works, including The Year After Dayton, Pripyat, and Our Daily Bread. Geyrhalter explores and chronicles dimensions of 21st-century civilization that tend to remain hidden or ignored. His most recent film, 7915 KM, takes the annual off-road race, the Dakar Rally, as a pretext for observing the communities in the various African countries through which it passes.
