If you think that only in Russia among the creative intelligentsia it is customary to hate their country and receive state money for this, then you have not yet seen Austria.
There is a great acting tradition here, and therefore there are such real world figures as Klaus-Maria Brandauer, Nadia Tiller, Romy Schneider, Christoph Waltz.
And even the inventor of cellular communications, Hedy Lamarr, was also an Austrian actress.
And Emily Cox.
Who Said Schwarzenegger?
For that matter, Larisa Udovichenko and Irina Kupchenko are also from Vienna.
The dramaturgical tradition is quite local and sometimes purely leftist.
Of the writers, the world was able to remember only Sacher-Masoch, and that was because of the term "masochism", and Dürrenmatt and Zweig (not to offer Hungarians and Czechs from the time of the empire).
But there is an amazing author, writer and playwright - Thomas Bernhard, to read whom is a pure, uncomplicated pleasure (just try to avoid the ubiquitous Rita Rait-Kovaleva - it's a disaster). And this author put all his work on what his contemporaries called "the denigration of Austria." It got to the point that he explicitly forbade in his will to stage his plays on the territory of his homeland. By the way, he died in his house on the lake in Gmunden. At home.
He wrote this about Salzburg, from which our opera tourists are thrilled: Mozart festivals, this city for such a person will become terrible, cold, like death, a museum, a collection of all diseases, all meanness, where all imaginable and inconceivable obstacles will arise for him, mercilessly destroying, deeply insulting him ... residents who are mired in the quagmire of philistine morality. "
Bernhard could not stand one of the two Nobel Prize laureates in literature in Austria in history - Peter Handke, although they both hated their country equally.
True, the latter made only two attempts to live in Austria, but again escaped under the spitting of his colleagues.
Although he also flew from Germany - from Gunther Grass himself.
In general, the quagmire of philistine morality, about which Bernhard wrote all his life, finished off Handke too.
It was all after the 70s, and since then nothing good actually happened.
And there is also a cinema in Austria.
It was brought from America by Count Alexander Kolovrat-Krakowsky and founded the first film company Sascha-Film.
Since then, in this stylistic paradigm, local cinema, where breakthroughs happen, has been linked, but only because the neighboring German cinema is completely devoid of a sense of humor.
And there was only one filmmaker here - Fritz Lang (Metropolis (1927), M Killer (1931)), and he filmed in Germany.
The second Austrian director and producer who made not only the salons in the best houses of Carinthia and Styria talk about himself is our contemporary Ulrich Seidl.
A very evil-tongued Seidl - in full accordance with the precepts of Thomas Bernhard, only in the movies.
In order to enter Seidl's work, I would advise you to carefully watch the film "Children of the Dead" (2019) from the program of the Berlin Festival. Based on a completely wild novel by Elfriede Jelinek, where Austro-German zombies are punished by an invasion of victims of the Holocaust, the film cracks down on modern-day Austria. Only one catch in the bushes of a group of illegal immigrants who appear to be fugitive Syrian poets, which is worth it. It doesn't matter that the film has two nominee directors. Here is the producer Ulrich Seidl, and this is all his personal cart and manifesto.
Jelinek was the first Austrian Nobel laureate for literature. It’s also that little thing - she was even a member of the Communist Party and the wife of Hyungsberg, film composer Rainer Fassbinder. You've probably seen the movie "The Pianist" with Isabelle Huppert? So this is her book in fact and, as they say, largely autobiographical. This Nobel laureate also does not favor his country, which is already quite ridiculous: she recalled all the productions of her plays in her homeland and forbade them to be staged in Austria in the future.
It is possible that Seidl's worldview was influenced by the fact that his parents, although they were doctors by profession, were at the same time rather rigidly religious Catholics. And in general, as a child, he was going to become a priest. But he went to the Vienna Film Academy. And as you know, the Viennese academies are a very funny thing, at one time they simultaneously hounded both Hitler and Freud, being in complete cognitive dissonance.
This is probably why we do not know, except for Seidl, a single graduate of the Vienna Film Academy, but they are. Every year. Seidl shot two short films: Einsvierzig ("Forty-one" on some surzhik, 1980) and "Ball" (1982) - about a school ball in some tiny city. From the very beginning, he chose a strange symbiosis of the game and the dock - so much so that sometimes it is not clear what is in front of you. But the fact that there is not even a minute of embellishment of reality is a fact. It is no wonder that after the academy he directed the documentary feature Good News (1990) about the dramatic difference in the lifestyle of those who make newspapers and those who sell them. It is clear that in 1990, life in Austria was also not sugar, but still someone lived better, and someone was completely at the bottom. This is all Seidl shows.
Loss Is Expectation was released in 1992.
And again, it is not clear whether this is a fiction film or a documentary.
1992, winter.
The border between Austria and the Czech Republic is two tiny towns.
In Austrian, a widower who is running out of food supplies left by his deceased wife and needs to look for a new wife.
He looks through binoculars at the aunts on the other side of the border.
And they, in turn, discuss their problems, alcoholic husbands, their absent sex life, etc.
We would call it "perestroika cinema".
He receives five orders for television films in a row.
1994 saw the release of The Last Men, the entire testimonial film.
True, this is exactly the way of demonstrating actual life that no country really wants to see about itself.
But, on the other hand, it all pays off by how much the author pities and empathizes with these people.
No hysteria and snot.
But empathizes.
In 1995, it became clear that, as a director, Seidl was going to ask pepper.
The painting "Animal Love" also consists of a human mosaic: here are collected very unglamorous, ordinary people with a bunch of problems, which have one thing in common - they love their pets.
Some, I would say, are too intimate.
I don't know who will translate it, so it's better to watch it with English subtitles: the characters speak Wienarish - a completely separate dialect of German, which is closer to Bavarian than to Austrian German.
The next picture, "Fan of the Bust," is less social and has less of the unsightly truth of life.
It's about a school math teacher who lives with his mother at 50 and dreams of a movie star named Saint Berger, who was notable for her chest size.
"Well, who is Romy Schneider when there is Sente Berger?"
He even somehow attaches his favorite mathematics to the system for describing the female breast.
The Berliner Zeitung has clearly captured the director's message: “One of the most common accusations against director Ulrich Seidl is that he commits treason towards those who appear before his camera in his documentaries, which are always also phenomenological studies of society.
He made fun of them and gave them come-outs.
The fact is that Seidl does not protect the people he portrays, either from themselves or from us.
Seidl does not look away, does not lower his eyes in embarrassment, does not hide anything. "
Well, the fact that he doesn't hide anything sometimes works against him.
For example, at some point, they simply began to ban it.
So, the film "Models" (1998) was banned in Slovakia.
Because about the wild life of models, with cocaine and blackjack, he filmed among models from this country.
But "Dog Day" (2001) has already won the Grand Prix of the jury at the Venice Film Festival.
This is a film about the life of young people on the outskirts of Vienna.
And yes, it is also very difficult to distinguish it from the documentary.
One of the roles is played by a very serious theatrical Austrian actress Maria Hofstatter.
In such small countries as Austria, however, being only a film actor is a big luxury, too modest production.
Basically, actors work in theaters, and not only in Austrian, but also have contracts in Germany or Switzerland for several years.
He received an award from the Vienna Film Festival for a film that he could not help but make, given his family history.
“Jesus, You Know” (2003) is literally the confession and prayers of six ordinary people right on camera.
"Import-Export" started right away at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, where it claimed the Golden Bough.
There are two subplots for the gossip in Viennese cuisine.
Here is a Ukrainian woman who worked as a nurse on her way to clean the floors in Austria.
And here is a very dysfunctional young Austrian who travels to Ukraine to put the local slot machines there, which he stole in a landfill.
“Be it Austria or Ukraine, in both countries it is cold, damp, dreary in winter, and people are freezing.
So at first glance, life there isn't that different. "
The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote that this is the best film on the Cannes Film Festival program.
And Die Welt scolded for the long timekeeping and "enjoying the bitter aftertaste."
But the deed is done: Seidl reached a new level and became visible not only in Austria, but also in Europe and other countries.
He needed some big breakthrough.
And he did it by filming the "Paradise" trilogy.
For two years he made three films under the general title, but with the expansion - "Love", "Faith", "Hope".
In fact, this is the story of three related women: two sisters and a daughter of one of them.
Each part is a separate film about one of them.
In Love, the heroine, played by popular theatrical actress Margarete Tisel, is an adult, to say the least, Austrian who travels to Kenya to have a sexy party with local young and healthy guys, all of whom act like a real prostitute.
Who, in fact, is.
But this does not stop her - benefits are more valuable than costs.
"Paradise.
Faith ”is even tougher - about a medical woman whose free time is completely devoted to Christ.
And when we begin to understand that there is a lot of unsatisfied sexuality in this faith, her crippled Afghan husband returns from somewhere.
And everything returns to religious confrontation.
Starring Maria Hofstatter.
"Paradise.
Hope ”is about the 13-year-old daughter of the very same Melanie, who went on vacation to Kenya to please the flesh.
The girl is fat, and so she was sent to the "diet camp".
But everything happens there, like ordinary teenagers: the first cigarette, food under the covers, dances, and, of course, the girl fell in love with the camp director, who is 33 years older than her.
The poor man was tormented, tormented by temptation, but still forbade her to even approach and talk until the end of the shift.
Those who are more familiar with cinema, of course, will see in this trilogy the answer to Krzysztof Kieslowski and his films under the heading Three Colors. Anyone who has read the books will remember first of all the novel Faith, Love, Hope (Dance of Death) (1932) by the caustic writer of the beginning of the century Eden von Horvath. Moreover, Seidl once said that this book made a strong impression on him in childhood.
His next picture is again documentary, although it is very difficult to believe that people open up so much to the director and that this is not a production. The film "In the Basement" (2014) is dedicated to the inexplicable passion of Austrians for basements. Austrian cellars are not always about Natasha Kampusch, but the fact that Austrians are hiding en masse in cellars and nursing their darkest desires there is a factual fact. In the film, Seidl simply shows the basements in private houses equipped according to interests and talks to their owners.
Somewhere it is a married couple of sadomasochists (and here is a sadist wife who works as a nurse in a nursing home), somewhere it is a basement where an amateur brass band gathers to play music from the times of the Anschluss in interiors with Nazi memorabilia - from a flag to real sets of Nazi uniforms.
At this point I already wanted to exclaim: “I don’t believe!”, But the fact that two municipal deputies, who appeared in the frame in a small nostalgic orchestra, were kicked out of their chairs, leaves no doubt that it is all true.
As a Russian friend of mine, who was built by the Austrians for wine cellars, says: “Why did you show me this film?
Now I notice all the time that I am being invited to the local cellars. "
Yes, it's hard to see.
So Seidl achieved what he wanted.
To date, he has produced six films, the last of which is Lucifer, and is due to be shown in August 2021 at the Locarno Film Festival.
And he shot one documentary - "Safari" (2016) - about the incredible cruelty of European hunters who come to Africa on vacation to hunt.
In general, it was a story about how in a small country you can become a great cinematographer - there would be a desire and talent.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.