World Film Locations: Vienna

Robert Dassanowsky, Robert Dassanowsky

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781841507361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

World Film Locations: Vienna provides a panorama of international motion pictures shot on location in Austria's once imperical capital. Informative reviews of 46 film scenes and evocative essays examine for the first time Vienna's relationship to cinema outside the waltz fantasies shot in the studios of Hollywood, London, Paris, Berlin... and Vienna. Illustrations and screen-grabs are set alongside current images, as well as city maps locating 'cinematic Vienna'. A Vienna at the crossroads of a turbulent history, as a source of great music and literature, and a site of world-famous architecture ranging from gothic cathedrals and baroque palaces to Jugendstil (Vienna's art nouveau) to the eco-challenges of the postmodern is revealed. Spotlight essays cover the images that evoke the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the pioneering filmmaking of Willi Forst and Walter Reisch in the 1930s; Vienna's role in the entertainment cinema of the Third Reich; opulent royal epics of the 1950s and the city as backdrop for international moviemaking; Jewish filmmakers and their take on lost cultural imagery; and a startling New Wave cinema from filmmakers such as Michael Haneke, Barbara Albert and Ulrich Seidl.

VIENNA

City of the Imagination

Text by MICHAEL BURRI

A PRODIGIOUS IMAGE MACHINE, Vienna excels as a global brand. Far from the city’s landmarks: St Stephen’s Cathedral, the Schönbrunn Palace, and the Ringstrasse, a lightly stamped ‘made in Vienna’ is recognizable in character types and stories, sounds, settings and choreographies. Meanwhile, an aspirational Viennese lifestyle can be found in virtually any major North American or European city. A European cousin to Hollywood, Vienna is a soft power empire whose fictions and fantasies have colonized our imagination. This Vienna belongs to the world. But Vienna also belongs to film-makers who – whether they embrace or reject it – struggle with the extraordinary success of the global brand Vienna. Vienna films are always a tale of two cities. The first Vienna is a vast aggregation of artifacts, emotional associations, and histories – monarchy, Mozart, Freud, Blue Danube, two catastrophic world wars, and the rest. The second Vienna is the city that film directors adapt, redefine, and remake in the shadow of the first. Films set in Vienna thus unfold amid a surplus of images. The city does not have to introduce itself: we already know too much.

Ernst Lubitsch once quipped that he might prefer Paris, Paramount to Paris, France. Early big-budget films tended to present a studio Vienna reconstructed around visually dominant locations. In Der junge Medarus/The Young Medarus (1923) the pre-Hollywood Michael Curtiz recreated Schönbrunn, St Charles Church, and St Stephen’s as alternating backdrops. The Wedding March (1928), by Vienna-born Erich von Stroheim, actually did substitute Vienna, Paramount for Vienna, Austria. Like his Merry-Go-Round (1923), whose budget-busting rebuilding of Vienna in a southern California backlot cost him his director’s job, The Wedding March mapped social hierarchies onto the urban space. The inner city marks the merging of religious and imperial tradition, high culture and the elite male, while the suburban periphery features popular entertainment, commerce, and the erotically-charged lower-class female.

Some early films did combine studio interiors with iconic city exteriors. Gustav Ucicky’s Café Elektric/Cafe Electric (1927) casts St Stephen’s as a distant crime scene backdrop, while Paul Fejös’s Sonnenstrahl/Ray of Sunshine (1933) transfers its visual focus from the old urban landmarks to the monumental apartment buildings recently built in the outer districts by the municipal socialist government. More characteristic, however, was Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), a remake of Ludwig Berger’s Ein Walzertraum/A Waltz Dream (1925), filmed at Vienna, Paramount. Stock footage of the cathedral-spired and domed skyline, Hofburg Palace and the Graben establish location and then yield to a Vienna of opulent interiors, garden restaurants and romantic park benches.

Dog Days (2001)
© 2001 Allegro Film

Recognizable cityscapes and exterior locations, even when reconstructed, imply an engagement with politics and a willingness to acknowledge a socially precarious urban environment. But it was the relocation of dramatic action to interior spaces that in the 1930s films of Willi Forst produced the most enduring and emulated cinematic articulation of Vienna. Indeed, his directorial debut, Leise flehen meine Lieder/Gently My Songs Entreat (1933) may be seen as an ironic farewell to the exterior location. Opening with a shot of St Stephens’s, the camera pulls back. The image is revealed as a painting, freight on someone’s back, on its way to a pawnshop to be sold. With Maskerade/Masquerade (1934), Forst – whom a 1936 German film trade paper called the ‘man who created a city’ – most fully elaborated the formula of the ‘Viennese Film’. Its visual centre is the ballroom, a location that masterfully fused core elements of the Viennese brand: high society, music, conviviality, romantic intrigue and perhaps, above all, the waltz – the last an element ideally suited to cinematic representation and proprietarily Viennese.

Cafe Electric (1927)
© 1927 Sascha-Film

It should be impossible to open a film with the phrase, ‘I never knew the old Vienna.’ But Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) did just that, and in retrospect, the post-war years offered a brief window in which such a helpless confession seemed sensible, even desirable. Reed’s masterpiece shattered the consensus around the older ‘Viennese Film’, if such a consensus ever existed, and delivered a new synthesis of Viennese characters, situations and urban topographies. To this synthesis belongs Vienna as a transitory space, a neutral frontier city, located between the ‘free’ West and the soviet East. Leopold Lindtberg’s Die Vier im Jeep/Four in a Jeep (1951) and John Glen’s The Living Daylights (1987), among other works, testify to Vienna as a locus classicus of the Cold War genre film. Of course, not every reworking in The Third Man enjoyed such an auspicious afterlife. Emil Reinert’s Abenteuer in Wien/Adventure in Vienna (1952) remains one of the few attempts at a Viennese film-noir style. And one wonders whether Reed would claim Guido Zurli’s Lo Strangolatore di Vienna/The Mad Butcher (1971), the story of a narcissistic and murderous profiteer who treats his victims as meat, among his cinematic progeny.

...in response to the widespread perception that the inner city has become an enclave of the rich and famous, New Wave Austrian film has tended to find its stories in the outer districts and social periphery.

Recent generations of Austrian film-makers have increasingly argued that Viennese films too often say what has already been said, rather than how people actually live in Vienna. As a result, and in response to the widespread perception that the inner city has become an enclave of the rich and famous, New Wave Austrian film has tended to find its stories in the outer districts and social periphery. Ulrich Seidel’s Hundstage/Dog Days (2001) and Götz Spielmann’s Antares (2004) stand here for many. And yet, certain locations continue to catalyse certain kinds of action. The Prater marks the place of casual encounters and improbable twists of fate. Thus, Willy Schmidt-Gentner’s Prater (1936), the story of an unlikely romance that begins there, speaks across decades to Wilhelm Pellert’s sharply critical Jesus von Ottakring/Jesus of Ottakring (1976), in which a factory owner, randomly harassed by thugs at the Prater, subsequently hires those thugs to commit his crimes. And a rescue from drowning in Sonnenstrahl/Ray of Sunshine (1933) at the Danube River, a traditional site of danger and ruined lives, is echoed nearly half a century later in Peter Patzak’s Den Tüchtigen gehört die Welt/The Uppercrust (1981), a dark tale of politics and crooked property deals along the river. Meanwhile, feature television films, like the irregular detective series Trautmann (2000–08), have invested less traditional public spa...