Vienna Is No More?

Film History, Psycho-Geography, and the Great City of Dreams

Author(s): Noah Isenberg
Source: Film Quarterly , Vol. 67, No. 4 (Summer 2014), pp. 67-72
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2014.67.4.67

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Vienna Is No More? Film History, Psycho-Geography,
and the Great City of Dreams
Noah Isenberg

Sometime during the fateful year of 1968, when a relatively films from Austria’s silent era, Hans Karl Breslauer’s Die Stadt
young German film critic named Frieda Grafe was engaged in ohne Juden (The City Without Jews, 1924), a striking anti-
an extended correspondence with the eminent Hollywood antisemitic film presented as an Expressionist parable—when
director Josef von Sternberg, they reached a critical point in Vienna’s Jews are forced to flee, all manner of cultural life,
their exchange at which Sternberg, having left Austria for not to mention banking, is brought to its knees—and Leo
good as a young boy, almost seems to have lost his patience. Stoll’s Sami kratz sich (Sammy Scratches Himself, 1919), a de-
“Vienna is no more,” he insisted rather emphatically. “What lightful farce performed by the Jewish cabaret group Budapest
you seek there, you will not find.”1 Grafe would continue to Orpheum Society, both of which have been the beneficiary of
search nonetheless, and she would write some of the finest major preservation efforts by the Filmarchiv Austria and were
pieces of criticism on the subject. But her views concerning accompanied in these New York screenings by a live perfor-
the “reservoir of dreams,” as she called the onetime Habsburg mance of original music.
capital, didn’t necessarily contradict those held by Sternberg. In their collaboration, Horwath and Siegel attempted
“Austrian film history is a phantasm,” she wrote decades later, to emphasize the more ephemeral forms (amateur films,
“because it is not tied to a fixed place; its cinema is a kind of anonymous and non-anonymous fragments, avant-garde
film without a specific space.”2 productions) alongside the established, well-known “Wiener
That very paradox—the persistent conjuring of an imagi- Filme,” such as Willy Forst’s Maskerade (1934) and Walter
nary world, on the one hand, and the stubborn truth that there Reisch’s Episode (1936), both made in pre-Anschluß Austria,
is a city known to the world as Vienna on the other—appears and Billy Wilder’s frothy musical The Emperor Waltz (1948).
to have been the chief point of departure for the “Vienna Especially in the case of Wilder’s film, the cultural clichés of
Unveiled” show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) co- a Hollywood-confected Austria run wild—featuring Bing
organized by Joshua Siegel, curator in MoMA’s film depart- Crosby yodeling and folk dancing in lederhosen (the Canadian
ment, and Alexander Horwath, director of the Austrian Rockies serving as an ersatz backdrop for the Tyrolean Alps),
Film Museum in Vienna. With close to seventy titles, including and German-born character actor Sig Ruman, known for his
shorts, newsreels, documentary and fictional features from the Teutonic shtick, as a heavily accented canine psychoanalyst.
silent era to the present, along with experimental and commer- (“In the daytime they make violins,” says Crosby as the uppity
cial productions from both sides of the Atlantic, the series American traveling salesman Virgil Smith, with a Wilder
ran for nearly two full months this past spring. It gave New wink-wink and a nudge, “in the evening, they fiddle.”)
Yorkers a chance to help celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of In certain cases, such as Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), his
the Austrian Film Museum, to discover quite a few rarities and final film, set among the excesses of contemporary New York
to reacquaint themselves with a number of widely acclaimed but using Viennese dramatist Arthur Schnitzler’s Traum-
classics.3 novelle (Dream Story, 1926) as its narrative basis, it is more a
Given the vast number of films, the programmers sought to matter of “psycho-geography,” as Horwath likes to call it, than
bundle them in groupings more or less defined by time period, the concrete topography of Vienna. The mental landscape—
origin of production, genre, style, or sensibility. For instance, the city’s ethos as it once articulated itself and has continued to
the show highlighted on its opening evening two rediscovered be remembered in film, literature, music, and other forms of
cultural expression—offered not just Kubrick, but many other
Film Quarterly, Vol. 67, Number 4, pp. 67–72, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. non-Austrian filmmakers a space in which to explore funda-
© 2014 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through
mental themes, especially regarding sexuality in the modern
the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www. urban sphere, that still remain timely, even provocative in our
ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2014.67.4.67.
current age.

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 Stadt Ohne Juden (City Without Jews). 1924. Austria.
Directed by Hans Karl Breslauer. Image courtesy The Austrian
Film Museum

“You can really trace the history of cinema through the

history of moving images of Vienna,” co-curator Siegel re-
cently told me. The ambitious, wide-ranging sweep of the
series proved this point over and over, starting with the early
attraction of 1906, Eine Fahrt durch Wien (A Journey through
Vienna), a Lumière-style actualité film shot from the win-
dow of a railway tram, produced by the Pathé Frères, and P.R.A.T.E.R. 1963-66. Austria. Directed by Ernst Schmidt Jr.
proceeding through a number of key junctures in the evolu- Courtesy sixpackfilm

tion of motion pictures, from the pioneering silents and post-

war landmarks of the avant-garde, up to the most recent
work in experimental and commercial cinema. The recently and then repeats the same utterance once more, in case peo-
restored silent Der Mandarin (The Mandarin, 1918), in a pres- ple didn’t notice.
ervation jointly undertaken by George Eastman House and In P.R.A.T.E.R. (1963-66), an Actionist short photographed
the Austrian Film Museum, affords precious glimpses of the at Vienna’s famous amusement park, home of the giant Ferris
initial wave of narrative feature films dealing with hypnosis, wheel (the Riesenrad), and made by Ernst Schmidt, one of the
madness, and sexual pathology in the wake of the Great key figures in the avant-garde scene, “Vienna Unveiled”
War—a couple of years ahead of Robert Wiene’s world- charts the move away from strict documentary toward a more
renowned Das Cabinet des Caligari. (Within this same general meta-cinematic style. The subject is something that the con-
context, the series also presented a few of the American silent temporary German experimental filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger
classics by Erich von Stroheim and Ernst Lubitsch, recreating would build upon—less of overt homage than an iconoclastic
imperial Vienna in the studios of Hollywood). restaging—over four decades later in her Prater (2007). A rare,
Of particular note was a spectacular 1931 newsreel short, under-recognized Austrian entry to film noir, Abenteuer in
Charly [sic] Chaplin in Wien, only four minutes in length, in Wien (Stolen Identity, 1952), directed by Emil Edwin Reinert
which audiences were given the chance to see the Tramp on as the first Austrian-American co-production since the 1920s,
tour to promote City Lights, released that same year. Like a turns Vienna into an atmospheric site every bit as stylish and
stage-diving rock star, Chaplin soars above the throngs of evocative as better-known Hollywood noir classics, with the
Viennese fans, when suddenly he stares at the viewfinder, same general cast of liars, double-crossers, and cheats that pop-
seemingly unprompted, and for the first time ever, speaks on ulate that universe. Reinert’s film, moreover, serves as a pivotal
camera. “Guten Tag,” he says somewhat impishly, as if he example of the putatively Viennese art of the imposter: the
were just as surprised as the audience to hear himself talking, German title, literally translates as “Adventure in Vienna,”

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conveying the excitement of the thriller, while the English- Actionist movement, EXPORT applies pressure to the half-
language release title, Stolen Identity, could almost serve as a hearted efforts of de-Nazification, lambasting as she does the
postwar epitaph for Vienna. Indeed, it’s tempting to read the unbroken transition from the Nazi film industry to com-
swapping of identities that takes place in the film, with the mercial film of the 1950s, 60s and 70s.5 Just as the signatories
lead posing as an American, as an allegory of the city’s trans- of the New German Cinema’s legendary 1962 Oberhausen
formation under Allied occupation immediately after the war. Manifesto declared that “Papa’s Kino” is dead, EXPORT,
Other critical moments in cinema history, and in Austrian with her own brand of erotic-comic performance art, lobs
political history more specifically, are addressed by a number a few more Molotov cocktails at the patriarchal establish-
of films in the series. Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (1938), ment with all the force, and indeed the stunning formal
is an official propaganda short in which the many sequences challenges, of such later films as Alexander Kluge’s Die
of goose-stepping Nazis in jackboots almost seem to have Patriotin (The Female Patriot, 1979).
been spliced together from short ends of Leni Riefenstahl’s The programmers made a conscious decision to showcase
Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935). The Soviet Austrian and non-Austrian filmmakers alike. A terrific
documentary Vena (1945), directed by Jakov Posel’skij, example of this is their inclusion of the Canadian-born,
chronicles the first weeks in which the Red Army liberated Viennese-based filmmaker John Cook—a key figure in
the city, juxtaposing static shots of such treasured cultural Vienna’s independent film scene of the 1970s—with his
sites as Mozart’s former house with traveling shots of the first major film, Schwitzkasten (Clinch, 1978), based on an
piles of rubble, tumbling swastika-laden monuments, left in Austrian novel by the leftist author Helmut Zenker. Set in
the aftermath of the Allied air campaign, and ultimately a distinctly working-class milieu, the film chronicles the
showing Viennese citizens waltzing on city squares to cele- existential woes of a Viennese garden laborer named
brate the fall of National Socialism. Johannes Rosenberger Hermann (Hermann Juranek), who finds himself increas-
and Michael Palm’s Heldenplatz, 12. März 1988 is a short, ingly numb to the world. Its languid pacing, utterly spare,
intense agitprop intervention—a man in uniform, filmed at claustrophobic mise-en-scène, and unvarnished produc-
close range, belting out a 3-minute patriotic ballad at the city’s tion values give the film a rough-hewn, minimalist qual-
so-called “Heroes’ Square”—aimed at cutting through the ity, yet without the surreal overlay found in EXPORT.
hypocrisy of the Kurt Waldheim presidency. It also under- The portrait of 1970s Vienna rendered in Cook’s film is
scores the widespread fear that symptoms of “Waldheimer’s thoroughly unglamorous, even jaundiced, offering few es-
disease”—the illness that lets you forget you were a Nazi— capes from the dull, oppressive tedium of everyday life.
had begun to infect the Second Republic. Yes, Sternberg’s While the Vienna of the Habsburg era was commonly re-
Vienna was surely no more, but members of the oppositional garded as an amalgamation of ethnicities, languages, and re-
Left did all that they could to make sure Waldheim’s Vienna ligions, only in the few past decades has the city come to see
did not stand in its place. itself as a cosmopolitan center once more. The growing pains
One of the series’ undeniable highlights was the appear- that it has encountered in the process—articulated in various
ance of acclaimed Austrian experimental filmmaker and forms of exclusion, oppression, and reluctant acceptance—
performance artist VALIE EXPORT, who introduced her are depicted in several of the selected films. Contemporary
dazzling first feature-length work Unsichtbare Gegner (Invis- Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl’s Good News: Von Kolporteuren,
ible Adversaries, 1977), a satirical and truly hallucinatory toten Hunden und anderen Wienern (Good News: Newspaper
take on Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955), Salesmen, Dead Dogs and Other People from Vienna, 1990)
along with a pair of experimental shorts by her compatriots, casts a glaring light on the exploited foreigners, largely from
Kurt Kren’s 5/62 Fenstergucker, Abfall, etc. (5/62 Window Muslim countries, who are charged with the task of peddling
Watchers, Rubbish, etc., 1962) and Hans Scheugl’s Hernals the Kronenzeiting, Austria’s trashy tabloid somewhat akin in
(1967).4 Nearly four decades after its premiere, EXPORT’s political stance and sensationalism to the New York Post, on
film, in which she also stars, retains much of its freshness. Its Vienna’s streets.
deeply personal, sly surreal quality—replete with oneiric For Seidl, as for fellow filmmaker Lisl Ponger, film tacitly
double exposures, stop motion, elliptical editing, voice distor- includes the matter of consciousness-raising, making Austrians
tions, and contrapuntal sound—works to unmask the linger- aware of this otherwise unrecognized segment of society.
ing forces of repression, and society’s dull complacency, still Ponger’s short essay film Phantom fremdes Wien (Phantom
operative in the postwar era. Like her comrades in Vienna’s Foreign Vienna, 2005) takes viewers into the intimate spaces in

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 Unsichtbare Gegner (Invisible Adversaries). 1977. Austria. Directed by VALIE EXPORT. Image courtesy sixpackfilm

which non-Austrians (Indians, Africans, Southeast Asians) Imperial capital, captures this aspect more powerfully than
observe their family rituals and celebrations in the city. Finally, most. Piano virtuoso Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) reveals
in Nordrand (1999), a first feature written and directed by the himself to be a great poseur, a playboy, and suave deliverer
29-year-old Barbara Albert, Vienna is shown as a common des- of honey-coated lines and midnight champagne. Flashbacks
tination for refugees from the Balkan civil war, a place where lifted from Zweig’s epistolary text detail how he courts and
people like Tamara (Edita Malovcic), a Serbian immigrant, then shamelessly neglects, indeed forgets, his lost lover Lisa
and Jasmin (Nina Proll), a Viennese outcast from the projects, Berndle (Joan Fontaine) of the film’s title. In what is perhaps
are equally vulnerable; they experience a kind of social under- its most remarkable scene, shot with notable subtlety by
tow similar to that conveyed in Schwitzkasten, but they also Viennese-born émigré cameraman Franz Planer (who lensed
experience moments of solidarity, suggesting hints of an un- Edgar G. Ulmer’s kindred melodrama, Her Sister’s Secret, a
derlying humanity that transcends the abject conditions in couple of years earlier), the two lovers sit in an amusement
which they exist. park railway car at the Prater. Once there, they’re able to in-
In considerable contrast, from the other side of the Atlan- dulge in fantasy travel, with Stefan calling out “Switzerland”
tic, the series also presented an array of non-Austrian fea- and the backdrop, suddenly moving, emulating the powers
tures that envision the grand city, occasionally with aching of studio rear projection and the dreamscape of cinema in
nostalgia, as the consummate site of romance, musical splen- general. Ophüls, who had spent part of the 1920s working in
dor, and cultural sophistication. Once widely seen, Max the theater in Vienna and whose films occupy a prominent
Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), based on place in the MoMA series, showed a true penchant for recre-
an eponymous short novella by Stefan Zweig and set in the ating the atmosphere of the fin de siècle: his adaptations of
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Letter from an Unknown Woman. 1948. USA. Directed by Max Ophüls

Schnitzler, Liebelei (1933) and La Ronde (1950), made respec- their Astoria studios; and Alfred Hitchcock’s Waltzes from
tively in Germany and France, luxuriate in the psychological Vienna (1934), made in Britain, another spin on Strauss, in
and romantic excesses of the period. similarly bouyant, comedic form, featuring the legendary
“The decadence of the Habsburg monarchy,” observes Blue Danube.
Thomas Elsaesser in an oft-cited piece on German film- It is quite natural that music plays such a key role in how
makers in exile, “was in some ways the pervasive sense of the city has been remembered, and continues to be remem-
impersonation, of pretending to be in possession of values bered, over time. By the eve of the Great War, a full century
and status that relied for credibility not on substance but on ago, a popular song entitled “Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume”
convincing performance, on persuading others to take an ap- (“Vienna, You are the City of My Dreams”), written by
pearance for the reality.”6 Many of the films, especially those Rudolf Sieczynski, was making the rounds in the Imperial
made outside of Austria and often by émigré directors like capital and becoming a worldwide hit. (Kubrick would later
Ophüls, convey that same talent for depicting a phantom ver- use it, as an ambient background, to set the tone for his Eyes
sion, a mythical empire, projecting the sights and sounds from Wide Shut.) Here’s the song’s catchy refrain:
inside the Hollywood studios. In this vein, the series included:
Jacques Feyder’s Daybreak (1931), another playful Schnitzler Vienna, Vienna, none but you,
adaptation undertaken by MGM and starring Roman Can be the city of my dreams come true
Novarro; Ernst Lubitsch’s refined take on a Strauss operetta Here, where the dear old houses loom,
in The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), made for Paramount in Where I for lovely young girls swoon.7
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 From the standard waltzes that recur with staggering fre- recreation of a phantom Habsburg Empire; or, perhaps, to re-
quency in the “Wiener Filme” made at home and broad to call once more what Grafe observed of Austrian cinema, it is a
Anton Karas’s haunting theme music played on the zither in movie that transcends a specific space. Taking his main cues
Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), and riffed upon at a pivotal from Viennese novelist Stefan Zweig—especially his novel
moment in Nicholas Roeg’s Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession Ungeduld des Herzens (Beware of Pity, 1939)—to whom he
(1980), the musical sounds of the city reverberate throughout dedicates the film, but also uncannily close to Abenteuer in
the series. The city’s love of spectacle and performance cannot Wien (Stolen Identity), Anderson taps into that era’s cultural
be totally repressed, not even during the Third Reich, as an spirit and its undying love for subterfuge and make-believe. In
extraordinary short Bei Achmed Beh (1944), filmed anony- Zweig’s source novel, the story takes shape around a Jewish lit-
mously inside a burlesque club during the final year of the war, tle pisher from the outer reaches of the Austro-Hungarian
makes plain. Nor can Hollywood’s love of music be kept from Empire named Lämmel Kanitz, who becomes the castle-
reentering into Austrian cinema, as Axel Corti’s Welcome in owning Baron von Kekesfalva. It is indeed a classic fantasy,
Vienna (1986), the final installment of his Wohin und zurück a dream really, of assimilation and success on the eve of
(Whither and Back) three-part television series, shows when tragedy, one that gets replayed with notable verve and wit
Claudia (Claudia Messner), the daughter of a Nazi official, in Anderson’s film. Thus Grand Budapest Hotel supplies an
sings “As Time Goes By” in a G.I. saloon. unexpected coda to “Vienna Unveiled” with the serendipity
There’s a memorable line from Eyes Wide Shut, cited by of its release, for in many respects it unveils not only a primal
Horwath in his published account of the show in the German urge suited for diagnosis by Dr. Freud but a central core of
weekly Die Zeit, which was originally borrowed by Kubrick the psycho-geography that is Viennese cinema.
from Schnitzler: “No dream is ever just a dream.”8 The
Vienna of which Sternberg spoke in 1968 may no longer Notes
exist, but in its place are new dreams and new perspectives of
1. Correspondence between Frieda Grafe and Josef von Sternberg,
the city. The magic has not vanished altogether, as Richard cited in English translation in Alexander Horwath, “Working
Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), the first in his trilogy of films with Spirits—Traces of Sternberg: A Lost Film About the ‘City
featuring Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), so of My Dreams,’” trans. Peter Waugh, Josef von Sternberg: The
poignantly conveys. Meeting aboard a train from Budapest Case of Lena Smith, eds. Alexander Horwath and Michael
bound for Paris, in an echo of the fantasy travel of Stefan and Omasta (Vienna: SYNEMA, 2007), 42.
2. Frieda Grafe, “Wiener Beiträge zu einer wahren Geschichte
Lisa in Letter from an Unknown Woman, they hastily disem-
des Kinos,” in Aufbruch ins Ungewisse: Österreichische Film-
bark together in Vienna, and enter into a dream world in schaffende in der Emigration vor 1945, eds. Christian Cargnelli
which they have seemingly stopped time. As they roam about and Michael Omasta (Vienna: Wespennest, 1993), 227.
the city, they take in all the sights that close to a century of cin- 3. Coinciding with the MoMA show, a citywide music festival,
ema have captured before them. In the context of “Vienna “Vienna: City of Dreams,” was sponsored by Carnegie Hall.
Unveiled,” they become a part of the larger story of Vienna’s 4. Born in Linz in 1940, under her given name Waltraud Lehner,
the feminist filmmaker VALIE EXPORT (written in capital
afterlife. Despite the ultimate need to bid farewell, the allure of
letters) took on her nom de guerre in 1967, asserting her wish
the city and the wonderful chance encounters—riding a street to shed all ties to the dominant patriarchal order: to her father,
car, shopping for records, strolling through the parks and her husband, and the Austrian state.
squares, sitting in an empty church, playing pinball at a night- 5. VALIE EXPORT first became famous in the late 1960s for
club, peering into a window and hearing a classical piano her performance pieces: Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action
sonata—that take place there will be forever preserved. Pants: Genital Panic) in which she strutted around a movie
theater wearing a pair of crotchless trousers, and Tapp- und
All in all, the co-curators succeed in presenting a massive
Tast-Kino (Tap and Touch Cinema) in which she walked
selection of films, the largest show ever devoted to the subject, around the streets with a cardboard-box cinema that featured
thus reaffirming the significance of Vienna both on screen and her breasts in place of puppets for passersby to touch.
off. Of course, if one searched long and hard, one could surely 6. Thomas Elsaesser, “Ethnicity, Authenticity, and Exile: A
come up with alternative titles and directors that could have Counterfeit Trade? German Filmmakers in Hollywood,”
been included; I was curious, for instance, why none of avant- Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place,
ed., Hamid Naficy (New York: Routledge, 1999), 112.
garde director Peter Kubelka’s work was featured. Although
7. Cited in Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/
it would have been impossible to add, given the timing of the 14 (New York: Da Capo, 2001), 185-186.
show, Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) is noth- 8. Alexander Horwath, “Wien entschleiert,” Die Zeit, 16 April
ing if not a nostalgic, loving, and almost perversely fastidious 2014.

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