Pointing the camera eastwards: Tracking down cutting-edge cinema

Ever since its founding in February 1964, the Vienna Film Museum has sought to be an “instruction for the eye” and “training of memory” for innovative (inter)national film. Film Museum director and cinephile Alexander Horwath imparts to us his knowledge of Eastern European cinema.

Heinrich Deisl: Two coincidental events: the 40th anniversary of the Film Museum and EU enlargement towards Eastern Europe on May 1. Wouldn’t the two events provide occasion enough to stage a film series featuring Eastern Europe?
Alexander Horwath dismissed the idea immediately: “No, we are not going to do a film series like that precisely because they are so en vogue right now. The Film Museum, as co-founder Peter Kubelka once put it, is a poetic and polemic institution that can operate independently of fashionable cinema trends.”
The Film Museum was also the first German-speaking counterpart to the renowned Cinémathèque Française in Paris. However, non-mainstream cinema is rarely a big money maker. The Film Museum is no exception. Horwath: “We simply don’t have the money for a big 40th anniversary celebration. Besides, we aren’t in the business of showing the official canon of the ‘100 Best Films of all Times’. Everyone is called upon to contribute actively in canonizing cinematic thought and cinematic memory. We draw up programs featuring a mix between thematic approaches and monographies.” That is why the presentations of the works such as that of the Polish artist Andrzej Munk (1922–1961) in April 2003 were not staged with fanfares and hype on Eastern Europe, but rather as an attempt to help people expand their habitual ways of seeing.

 
How would you assess the post-Communist era in Eastern European countries as far as film culture is concerned? Film in the European East was already much further advanced, but due to artistic and infrastructural deficits since the fall of Communism it has been struggling to survive. You have to recognize the fact that these countries’ film culture was taken more seriously in the Communist era – for whatever reasons. Working conditions and quality deteriorated rapidly after 1989. For a long time thereafter, the film archives were renounced because of their bad reputation. After all, the apparatchiks had served in them and were widely suspected of being propaganda mongers for the state. Among these people were highly educated film archivists, restorers, program organizers. Retrospectively viewed, the Eastern Europe film scene has left an enduring imprint on film history – remember for instance the Soviet revolutionary cinema of the 1920s, Polish film in the 1950s or the revival movements in the 1960s in countries such as Yugoslavia, Hungary, and former Czechoslovakia.

Those were the golden years of Czech cinema. Do they still exert an influence? To my mind, there is an exciting new generation of filmmakers working in the Czech Republic today, persons such as Kolja Raschke. Czech cinema was really extraordinary in the 1960s, strong enough to influence Hollywood. Nowadays it has lost a lot of its freshness. Petr Zelenka is also an intriguing filmmaker. The Národni Filmový Archiv in Prague, for instance, continues to do fantastic restorations of silent movies, but does not have sufficient funding to stage retrospectives.
When talking about the young Czech film, you have to keep in mind that it is a cinema which partly casts a flirtatious eye on exports. It is a humanistic cinema that tends to convey local color, in a somewhat touristy way. Nonetheless, it is not so local, parochial that people abroad can’t understand it. But you find that kind of work in every country: Cinema for the cultivated middle class, which I personally think is perfectly fine, but it seems irrelevant from the standpoint of a film museum.
Contrast it with Argentina, in which several outstanding films were produced in recent years with a claim to a place of honor in cinematic history - and financial resources there are as meager as they are in Eastern Europe.
Poland has to be confronted with its own film history: the memory of the Holocaust, the importance of religion, a search for identity …There are micro-traditions of lasting importance that flow almost subcutaneously. As far as Polish cinema is concerned, Andrzej Munk is the most important figure to my mind. Munk died young, making only four or five feature length films, but he was a much more interesting director for modern European post-war cinema than all of his Polish contemporaries, including Andrzej Waida. I think Munk’s pivotal film Pasazerka (1961) might well be the most powerful feature film every made on the Holocaust. Audiences in Poland are being confronted with a lot of full-scale historical dramas these days. That advances certain nationalistic strains and has much to do with the local film subsidy policy in Poland. I detect a certain coarseness of aesthetic expression. Given the grand history of the country, this certainly is a great disappointment. On the other hand, there are young people who have recently emerged in Poland and who are creating exciting work, Malgorzata Szumowska, for instance, Robert Glinski with Hi, Tereska or the film Edi.

And what shape is Austrian cinema in? Austria made its major contribution to international cinema with films by the Actionists Peter Kubelka, Valie Export, Kurt Krenn and others. This avant-garde tradition, well established since the 1950s, is acknowledged just as much as documentaries or feature films. I think this diversity of style is unique to the Austrian film scene. The avant-garde film and the independent film have always played a more important role here than elsewhere -- just think of Film Museum founder Kubelka. Interestingly enough, it is author-centered cinema, realistic and stark, which currently exerts a lot of influence. In these projects, filmmakers translate their own visions into a reality, writing the script, doing the shooting and the editing – like Barbara Albert, for instance, or Jessica Hauser or Peter Svoboda.

And what about the artistic potential of Eastern Europe? A person would have do some investigating to find out what is being staged there locally, what films are running in Prague, Budapest, Temešvar and so forth without every making it to Western Europe. That might give us an idea of what people in the respective countries consider a model, for artists and for audiences. What I am worried about is that people tend to be confronted with Quentin Tarantino films, with models like the film “Memento” (Christopher Nolan, 2000) or David Fincher (“Fight Club“, 1999), and that a lot of other films receive comparatively little attention.

Saved the great legacy to the point of oblivion, yet still full of hope. What can film museums like yours do to provide fresh impetus? As far as Slovenia and Croatia are concerned, they can point out a rich tradition of experimental film and video makers under the influence of the visual arts. The city of Zagreb was crucial in this development. There is an urgent need to thoroughly investigate the history of the films and videos that were created entirely outside the industry.
The Kinoteka in Ljubljana is doing important work in this respect. Like all the others, it has only a meager budget. In Poland, there is a classic film archive that puts together its programs almost entirely from its own collections, largely mainstream. The state film archive Gosfilmfond in Russia has been afflicted by a massive loss of funding.

How are young filmmakers and program creators responding to the current situation? I believe these countries’ new generation is capable of creating a film culture of new breadth and intensity. These young people are trying to reactivate marginal yet significant traditions in their countries. I have two acquaintances who draw up the programs at the cinematheque in Ljubljana. They take off from there in their car in the morning, watch films at the Vienna Film Museum and then drive back that same night. And they do that as often as twice a month. With that kind of almost self-exploitive enthusiasm, we can look forward to an exciting future.

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