Tales from the Vienna ’hood

And they’re not the only two. The push-and-pull between heightened realism (what Herzog calls “ecstatic truth”) and exploitation is at the heart of an entire wave of recent Austrian films that have taken, as their whole or partial subject, this essential dilemma: how to survive in a culture where we are constantly consuming images that tell us how we should live our lives, or becoming the images ourselves. (There is also a certain predilection for using shopping malls as the locations for sex orgies, but that’s a discussion best held for another time.) This surveillance-camera cinema, at once detached and probing, is seen to good effect in Michael Haneke’s best-known film, The Piano Teacher, as well as in his earlier trilogy of movies (The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) about the relationship between societal and media violence. It even helps to shape Barbara Albert’s big-hearted, if cynical, Free Radicals, the country’s official submission to this year’s foreign-language Oscar derby and — by Austrian standards — a downright touchy-feely crowd-pleaser.

The technique reaches its undeniable zenith, however, in Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s astonishing documentary Elsewhere (2001), which immerses us in the daily routines and rituals of some of the world’s last remaining tribal cultures, from Nigerian camel breeders to Greenlander fishermen to Australian Aborigines. Distilled into 12 20-minute segments, each shot in a different part of the world during a different month of the year 2000 and presented without the aid of voice-over narration, the movie is a potent and broad-minded assessment of life as it is lived today in places where mankind has long managed to survive sans the helping hand of modern technology or, indeed, of movies.

Collectively, these films are cause for excitement. I’m not sure that any other national cinema, of the many new or revitalized ones film festivals have “introduced” to us over the past few years, has proved itself as consistently stimulating and universally relevant or as fiercely committed to — as the title of a recent Austrian film series at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music put it — “Breaking Rules.” With any luck, one of our own local film-programming outfits will sooner rather than later follow BAM’s iconoclastic lead.

DOG DAYS| Directed by ULRICH SEIDL | Written by SEIDL and VERONIKA FRANZ | Produced by

HELMUT GRASSER and PHILIPPE BOBER | Released by Leisure Time Films | At the Nuart