Critics reviews

One of the strengths of Beckermann’s strategy of relying only on archival footage—beyond the fact that it lends the film a sense of immediacy and narrative intrigue—is that it affords the viewer ample opportunity to size up the carefully coiffed Waldheim, to see how this exemplar of Austrian gentility managed to wiggle his way out of every tight corner.

Several journalists perform keen off-the-cuff political analyses; several Austrian politicians bravely defy local orthodoxies; and free, frank hearings in the United States Congress add a painful element of nostalgia.

[The epigraph is] a wickedly delightful meta-error to introduce this proto-post-truth documentary, illustrating the warping of historical memory through time, a subject the film explores expertly and to devastating effect.

Watching Waldheim’s campaign, it’s hard not to think about the present day — from the emergence of old hatreds, to the closure of elite ranks around their own, to the weaponizing of nationalism against the truth. The film may end in 1986, but the darkness it reveals still looms.

Although reexamining a largely forgotten episode from the mid-1980s, The Waldheim Waltz by Austrian documentarian Ruth Beckermann could not be timelier. . . . That the filmmaker was part of the organized opposition to Waldheim and uses material from demonstrations in which she participated gives the movie additional passion.

Offering an examination of the workings of the governance and media of another time, but equally pertinent to today’s public discourse, The Waldheim Waltz makes for a complex and impassioned portrait of one society’s state of mind.

Ruth Beckermann’s last film, The Waldheim Waltz, it’s a rotund denunciation of Austrian former president Kurt Waldheim and his troublesome past with the former German National Socialist Party (the Nazi party) but, beyond that, is a profound gaze on how right wing politics are making a comeback in some European nations, and how people have or are basically forgotten crucial parts of the past.

Functioning like a ticking-clock thriller despite the well-established facts of the matter, Beckermann’s film is a coup of personal-political archeology.

Ruth Beckermann’s tremendously relevant documentary The Waldheim Waltz is an excellent barometer for measuring what 40 years of collective willful amnesia and denial can do to a country’s self-image.

What keeps The Waldheim Waltzengaging from moment to moment isn't so much a matter of narrative twists and turns as Beckermann's explorations of the ramifications of the arguments flung back and forth thirty years ago on the identity and future of a country that, just last December, voted in a ruling coalition of conservatives and nationalists.

While Beckermann keeps to a clear chronology limited to the months of his presidential bid, there is contextual insight aplenty in footage of Waldheim with his family as they ardently assist him in promoting his supposed «Christian values», This sheds light on the wider context of a society with a dangerous antipathy to plurality.

As much essay as straight documentary, the film is united by a lightly-woven thread in which Beckmann muses on the role of the film-maker in political action, and the question of whether it's better to take part in protests or stay behind the lens and film them: in fact, in her black-and-white footage, shot on an early video camera, Beckermann manages to do both.