New Austrian Film ed. by Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck (review)

This useful volume, an anthology of twenty-six essays on contemporary Austrian cinema, together with an introduction by the editors and an interview with the filmmaker Götz Spielmann, provides an excellent overview of a subject that deserves more critical and scholarly attention in English than it has received to date. Although a filmmaker like Michael Haneke looms large on the international film landscape—and receives appropriate attention in this volume—other filmmakers associated with contemporary Austrian cinema, such as Ulrich Seidl and Barbara Albert—to name just two of the most prominent—are still relatively underexplored, particularly in English-language scholarship. This volume therefore fills a critical gap, following up on Dassanowsky’s own Austrian Cinema: A History (2005).

The fact is that over the last two decades Austrian cinema has, at least in terms of film quality, enjoyed a remarkable renaissance, a renaissance that has coincided—perhaps paradoxically, perhaps not—with the unusual turmoil and recrimination in Austrian politics associated with the entry of Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party (FPÖ) into a coalition government with the conservative Volkspartei (ÖVP) in 2000, as well as with the subsequent internecine warfare within the FPÖ that led to the creation of the Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ). While all of this was going on politically, filmmakers like Seidl and Albert were presenting a picture of contemporary Austria that was both aesthetically gripping and politically and intellectually at odds with the rightward tilt in Austrian society. While Haider’s life and death might have been taken directly from a film by Seidl or Albert (or even Haneke), it is hard to imagine the former Carinthian Landeshauptmann professing enjoyment for these or other recent Austrian films, which have earned Austria, in the words of one New York Times reviewer, the title of “world capital of feel-bad cinema” (1).

One of the most remarkable aspects of the rise of Austrian cinema over the last two decades is the fact that some of its most prominent practitioners have been women—directors like Barbara Albert, with her acclaimed films Nordrand and Böse Zellen, or Kathrin Resetarits, Valeska Grisebach, and Jessica Hausner, all of whom receive respectful attention in this volume. As Verena Mund points out in her essay on Resetarits, “the fact that a remarkable amount of networking takes place among these filmmakers is rarely mentioned” (122) in film criticism. Or, as the critic Bert Rebhandl, whom Mund cites, puts it: “Austrian cinema has abandoned its former ‘great men policy’ and has re-shaped itself as a field” (123). This is a field of contact, collaboration, and mutual support in which different filmmakers assist each other in a variety of ways in the production of aesthetically demanding new films. In her essay on Grisebach and Hausner, Catherine Wheatley argues for the existence of a “feminine aesthetic” in some of these films, an aesthetic that does not try to confront the viewer with him- or herself (as films by Haneke might do, for instance) but that, rather, encourages the spectator to pay closer attention to the profilmic event. Wheatley calls this a “benign” as opposed to an “aggressive reflexivity,” and for her it is one of the key characteristics of contemporary Austrian cinema, especially in the films directed by women (145).

Although this volume’s contribution to the study of films by Austrian women is one of its major strengths, it does not ignore more famous men like Haneke. No fewer than four of the essays deal with Haneke (the films The Seventh Continent, Funny Games, La Pianiste, and Caché), and each of these essays contributes substantially to the understanding of a film auteur widely recognized as one of the most exciting directors of the last three decades. Catherine Wheatley (the only author who has two articles in the book and who also conducted the interview with Spielmann at the book’s end) makes a convincing distinction between Haneke’s approach to sexuality and voyeurism—characterized...