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19. 12. 11. - 16:00

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19. 12. 11. - 16:00

January and February at the Austrian Film Museum

The New Year’s programme at the Film Museum in Vienna, Austria is set to be just as busy as ever. With cinema from Giuseppe De Santis, Elio Petri and Armando Iannucci there is no shortage of entertainment to see viewers through the winter months.

Every month the cinema of the Austrian Film Museum, located at Augustinerstraße 1 in Vienna, attempts to preserve its collection of films with screenings and exhibitions open to the public. The new programme begins on 7 January and concludes on 9 February 2012.

The series of events begins with a celebration of the work of Giuseppe De Santis. As a film producer who stood for a truly popular, epic and communist cinema he presented in his film "La strada lunga un anno" (The Year-Long Road, 1958) the work of peasants and workers and their admiral common sense and organisational skills. Above all he believed that people watched movies in order to reach a different understanding about their lives and the society in which they live.

The series will contain such tales of morality as Roma ore 11 (Rome 11 O'Clock, 1952), disturbing melodramas like Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) and Un marito per Anna Zaccheo (1953) as well as a documentary about the achievements of the partisans and the suffering of the Italian population during the last months of the war in Giorni di gloria (1945).

De Santis was born in 1917 in Fondi, Italy, from simple but solid stock. In 1935, he went to Rome to study philosophy and literature - his first great love among the arts. He abandoned his studies, entered the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and quickly became a key film critic at Vittorio Mussolini's magazine, Cinema. Here, along with Luchino Visconti, Carlo Lizzani, Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli and others, he developed the theoretical principles of neo-realism.

Giuseppe De Santis' master student, Elio Petri will also feature at the museum from 7 January. More popular abroad than at home the leading Italian intellectuals of the new left did not know what to make of Petri’s baroque-sardonic, Pop Art vision of Brecht’s "theatre of the people". After his death, many of these writers confessed: We were wrong, we had blinders on; he was one of the greatest Italian filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s.

Born in Rome in 1929, he grew up as the son of a coppersmith in a working-class suburb.
After the Hungarian uprising Petri became De Santis' most important artistic collaborator and co-writer of the screenplays for Un marito per Anna Zaccheo (1953), Giorni d’amore (1954), Uomini e lupi (1957), La strada lunga un anno (1958) and La Garçonnière (1960).

As early as 1954, Elio Petri directed his first short documentary, Nasce un campione, but it took another seven years before he was able to complete his feature film debut, L'assassino (1961). The film indicated the direction in which Petri would develop - grim, penetrating considerations of society in genre form. Before his untimely death in 1982, he was only able to direct one more feature film, the uncannily "soft" Le buone notizie - and a television adaptation of Sartre's "Dirty Hands": Petri's reckoning with the legacy of Stalinism. Several of his films will be shown throughout the retrospective.

"In the Loop" by Armando Iannucci will also be screened on 2 and 3 February. Alongside Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant (The Office, Extras), Armando Iannucci, created of the celebrated series The Thick of It (2005-2009). The bite and precision of his political satire on the later Blair years is unparalleled, as is the cast that he brought together on this occasion.

Expanding on the television series and employing some of the same characters, Iannucci also directed a feature film: In the Loop premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and became a surprise hit with audiences and critics in the U.S. In the Loop draws a picture of Anglo-American relations on the eve of the Iraq war and the world of the respective "courtiers" of the political-media complex. In the midst of all the comedy, a sort of media-horror film rears its head: in an era of continuous "spin", language and information have become the weapons of evil.

Shot vérité-style and partially improvised, the film relies on Iannucci's outstanding team of actors, two of which shall be spotlighted here: Peter Capaldi, a veteran of the TV series, returns as the "demon-eyed and ninja-tongued" (Melissa Anderson) spin-doctor of the British prime minister; and James Gandolfini, who gives us the portrait of a skeptical U.S. general - a hybrid between Tony Soprano and Colin Powell.

"The Hall of Mirrors. Hollywood on Hollywood, 1950-62" retrospective is also to run from 19 January until 9 February. In the nineteen-fifties, the American film industry discovered a major new theme: itself. When undertaking this self-reflection of its own history and conflict-ridden present, Hollywood remained faithful to its most reliable genres: Whether film noir (Sunset Boulevard, In a Lonely Place), colour-drenched musical (Singin' in the Rain, A Star is Born), fiery melodrama (The Bad and the Beautiful) or psychological horror film (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?).

This hall of mirrors reflects an era of popular culture which, for the next quarter-century or so, would grant cinema a real starring role in public discourse: because it had finally gained an awareness of itself. The series will include 12 features and several shorts as well as a talk by film lecturer Drehli Robnik.

For more information on next month’s schedule visit: http://www.filmmuseum.at/en/film_programme/preview_january_%7C_february

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