Ostensibly titled after highly reactive (and consequently, short-lived) molecules that contain unpaired electrons in their outer shells, Barbara Albert’s Free Radicals presents a series of fractured (and often sexually gratuitous) tales of coincidence and synchronicity. The film unfolds in an organic structure that reflects the conventional proverb on the consequential, unforeseen, long-reaching effects of the […]
Tag: Austrian Cinema
Nordrand, 1999
The advent of the Balkan Wars following the collapse of the Soviet Union (and leading to the breakup of Yugoslavia) – and in particular, the engagement of NATO peacekeeping forces in Kosovo – forms the destabilized, uncertain backdrop for Barbara Albert’s politically loaded Nordrand, a zeitgeist film on the changing face of Austrian society at […]
Workingman’s Death, 2005
Michael Glawogger pulsing, ambitiously conceived global treatise on the drudgery, and often dehumanizing, rituals of manual labor at the beginning of 21st century – over a century after the birth of the Industrial Revolution – appropriately begins in the town of Donbass in the Ukraine, the coal mining town where, in 1935, Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov […]
Our Daily Bread, 2006
Evoking the aesthetics of Harun Farocki’s antiseptic images of production crossed with Chantal Akerman’s structuralist ruminations on organic landscape, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread is a bracing, surreal, sobering, and strangely transfixing exposition into the dehumanized technologies and industrially engendered process efficiencies intrinsic in the mass commerce of industrial-scale food production. Composed of a series […]
Elsewhere, 2001
In 2000, the final year of the twentieth century, Nikolaus Geyrhalter and his crew set out with a digital video camera to film twelve, self-contained ethnographic episodes, each encapsulating a month-long document of the lives of people who perform their quotidian rituals in a figurative “elsewhere” – distant cultures and remote geographies seemingly left untouched […]
Washed Ashore, 1994
An elderly cemetery caretaker, Josef Fuchs, impassively looks out into the Danube River before turning to face the camera and reciting Count Albrecht Graf Wickenburg’s requiem for the namenlos – the unidentified dead, often people who committed suicide or lost their lives in boating accidents, whose bodies have washed up along the riverbank over the […]