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Reviewed by:
  • World Film Locations: Vienna ed. by Robert Dassanowsky
  • Barbara Mennel
Robert Dassanowsky, ed., World Film Locations: Vienna. Bristol: Intellect, 2012. 128 pp.

World Film Locations: Vienna belongs to a series in which each volume focuses on one cinematic city ranging from the classics, like Berlin and Los Angeles, to less-known Glasgow and Reykjavík. The books share a consistent layout of brief scholarly texts, maps, shots of locations, and film stills to address a diverse audience of cinephiles, tourists, and academics. The series intends to lead readers on informed trips through respective cities and thus entice them to watch films organized according to different urban locales. Not surprisingly, then, the editors and authors of the different volumes include traditional scholars as well as bloggers, curators, freelance writers, and film directors.

Vienna’s design echoes its topic of visuality in relationship to the city’s built environment and topography. The volume includes a one-page introduction and seven two-page topical essays that alternate with six chronologically organized sections, each of which covers six to eight films in two pages each. A map of Vienna precedes every unit with numbers indicating the location of the films’ setting. All treatments of the films include on the left page a photo of the particular location that appears in the film with an accompanying one-paragraph discussion and on the right page five to eight shots that encapsulate a scene that features the particular setting. In addition to its function as introduction, guide, or reference to the films about Vienna, the book would also serve well as a textbook in classes on urban cinema or a topical guide for a study-abroad course to Austria.

Films set in Vienna, the authors demonstrate, feature opulent interiors [End Page 126] and romantic exteriors, which have branded and circulated the city’s image globally. Yet the films of the postwar period and recent New Wave subvert this splendor by choosing settings in unknown and alienated urban spaces of the city. In contrast to some of the other titles in the series, Vienna brings together well-established scholars. Those include, among others, Todd Herzog, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Joseph W. Moser, Heidi Schlipphacke, and Mary Wauchope in addition to the volume’s editor, Robert Dassanowsky. Their names alone represent scholarly expertise in Austrian Studies. And the volume makes good use of well-known specializations for individual contributions, such as Lorenz’s “The Jewish Topography of Filmic Vienna.” Reflecting the diversity of the intended audience, the paragraphs about individual films rely on a range of styles, from the essayistic to the scholarly. Some authors employ the tone of film reviews, with cursory information and anecdotal facts, while others advance a close reading, for example of a scene’s use of a building to mobilize its ideological weight or historical significance.

Yet the brevity of texts, the absence of footnotes, and the small number of books recommended for further reading are symptomatic of the—albeit intentional—academic restraint. Readers should neither expect overarching theoretical arguments nor in-depth exegeses of individual scenes. And despite the productive possibilities of the innovative organization, the structure might also frustrate a specialist: The limited number of film stills does not capture a cinematic sequence in the absence of editing, and one paragraph cannot offer a conclusive film analysis. The interspersed essays interrupt the chronology, and their arguments do not consistently correspond to the selection of the films. For example, Sathe’s informative essay on New Austrian Film illustrates how the movement counters the romantic fantasy of imperial Vienna as a result of immigration from the former East and the global South following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Yet the subsequent selection of seven examples from mainstream Hollywood and New Austrian Film does not continue Sathe’s points.

The book’s format indicates the increasingly porous boundary between scholarship based on academic conventions and the production of knowledge outside traditional institutions and media, primarily on the Internet. The combination of image and text marginalizes linear and in-depth arguments in favor of combinatory multiplicity, reflecting hypertext organization within the bounded limitations of a book. But what constitutes a book today? The...

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