Entrance to the Invisible Cinema at the Austrian Filmmuseum.
In 1989, on the occasion of its 25th anniversary, the Austrian Filmmuseum opened its famed “Invisible Cinema,” according to specifications laid out by filmmaker, theorist, and museum co-founder Peter Kubelka. Modeled after Kubelka’s original invisible cinema, built in 1970 at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, the Filmmuseum’s version is a black box creation that, by allowing for the least amount of peripheral light possible, points the viewer’s focus directly at the projected image. It is, as far as seating, quality of projection, and immersive atmosphere, an essentially perfect cinema. It was one of the places I most eagerly hoped to visit upon my first trip to the Vienna International Film Festival (Viennale), which this year celebrated its 60th anniversary; luckily, as one of the the festival’s primary venues, the Filmmuseum is a frequent destination during the Viennale’s extended annual run in late October, particularly for those wanting to explore its celebrated retrospective program, which largely centers around the Filmmuseum and which this year featured four director-focused strands, plus two themed sections.
One of the primary problems facing every festival-goer is how to most productively build one’s schedule—namely, which screenings to prioritize and which not to prioritize. Indeed, even within a modest retrospective program, such decisions can be vexing. This time out, I chose to focus on rarities, restorations, and archival prints—in most cases, films I hadn’t seen, by spotlighted directors Kijū Yoshida, Med Hondo, and Ebrahim Golestan; and in others, films I had never even heard of, most of which came from the Argentine noir sidebar. At the Viennale, the idea of invisible cinema doesn’t just relate to a physical space that projects films; it’s a kind of film, forgotten or unknown, worth bringing to light and contextualizing for modern eyes. (In that sense, the Viennale is ably expanding upon Kubelka’s original idea by conceptually incorporating it into multiple facets of the festival.)
Courtship (1961).
At 100 years old, Ebrahim Golestan is at once the oldest and most obscure of the festival’s featured directors. Until recently known mostly by reputation, the Iranian director is experiencing renewed interest due to Mitra Farahani’s latest feature, See You Friday, Robinson, in which Golestan and the late Jean-Luc Godard conduct a long-distance correspondence about cinema and the role of the artist. The Viennale’s program, overseen by London-based Iranian curator Ehsan Khoshbakht, comprised a good majority of Golestan’s extant filmography in new and recent digital restorations, alongside outtakes from his first and most well-known feature, Brick and Mirror (1964), a few films he either wrote or produced (most notably Forugh Farrokhzad’s landmark 1963 The House Is Black), and a selection of short works by other filmmakers dealing with themes and subject matter similar to Golestan. As Khoshbakht made a point of mentioning more than once in his introductions, these ancillary films were included to provide context for Golestan’s relatively slim oeuvre, and in many cases only work to reveal his artistry that much more forcefully by comparison. Indeed, when seen in the vicinity of the pro-forma 1952 British documentary Persian City, about oil operations in the city of Abadan, Golestan’s A Fire (1961), a vivid document of an oil well disaster in southwest Iran, or his later archeological essay film The Hills of Marlik (1963), one can’t help but be struck by the director’s advanced compositional and editing style, which moves at a rhythmic clip without disrupting the integrity of the filmed landscapes—to say nothing of his uniquely poetic sense of his country’s rich environmental and cultural histories. Similarly, in Courtship (1961), a short made for a Canadian omnibus television film about international betrothal rites, Golestan portrays Iran’s tradition of arranged marriage in unassumingly lyrical fashion, with scenes of loving domesticity overlaid with alternating male-female voiceover commentary that explains the country’s courting customs from differing perspectives.
Just as Golestan is known as the “Godfather of the Iranian New Wave,” having influenced the likes of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Med Hondo is often cited as one of the pioneers of post-modern African cinema, a fact most recently reinforced by the celebrated restorations of two of the Mauritanian director’s most adventurous features, the cross-continental docufiction Soleil Ô (1970) and the subversive musical-comedy West Indies (1979). Along with those titles, the Viennale presented a cross-section of Hondo’s lesser known work—stretching from before Soleil Ô, his first feature, all the way to his last, Fatima, the Algerian Women of Dakar (2004)—in a combination of archival prints and digital restorations from and by the Harvard Film Archive. Among the finds was Polisario, a People in Arms, a 1978 television documentary co-produced for Algerian TV about the clash between Morocco and the Polisario, a Saharawi nationalist liberation movement fighting for native rights in Western Sahara. Shot literally in the heat of battle, the film presents on-the-ground interviews with both Moroccan and Polisario soldiers alongside sequences of intense gunfire and combat. With surprising breadth, Hondo and a trio of cameramen capture multiple facets of not only the conflict, but also its effect on members of the local community, particularly the women and children who wield little power in the matter and who for stretches of the film are seen exiled in the desert as war rages close to home. At the center of Hondo’s 1986 feature, Sarraounia, is Queen Sarraounia of the Azna, one of the few African rulers, male or female, to successfully fight back against colonial oppression. Based on a book by Abdoulaye Mamani, the film dramatizes the queen’s struggle against a 1898 French military expedition (dubbed the Voulet–Chanoine Mission) that sought to unite French rule across West Africa. Adopting a distinctly classical approach befitting the story’s historical roots, Hondo mounts an epic tale of resistance that sidesteps genre tropes in favor of illustrative tactical minutia and rousing rhetorical grandeur that speak to the utility and urgency of the director’s career-long project.
Hardly a Criminal (1949).
Compared to Hondo and Golestan’s expressly political cinema, the films featured in the Argentine noir program felt understandably lighter, if no less pointed in their social and cultural concerns. Curated by Fernando Peña and Roger Koza, the section featured eight films produced during Peronism (1949–1956), when Argentine president Juan Perón’s populist-leaning policies united the working class against the social-liberal elite. In the pair of films I caught, evidence of this class conflict is reflected through a giddily pessimistic prism of grimly seductive criminal drama and coldly dispensed comeuppance. Based on real events, Hugo Fregonese’s Hardly a Criminal (1949) anticipates the expert sense of realism and suspense that the Argentine journeyman (who was recently fêted in Bologna with a full-scale retrospective) would soon bring to Hollywood in its story of a lowly insurance clerk (Jorge Salcedo) who hatches an embezzlement scam he knows can land him only a maximum of seven years in prison—a loophole he exploits by stashing the stolen money, purposefully getting caught, and then returning for the loot once his sentence is up. Even at this early stage (Hardly a Criminal was just his third feature), Fregonese displays a unique confidence in his storytelling acumen, as the film doubles back and around on itself while allowing for a series of set pieces (including one in which the protagonist walks the viewer step-by-step through his scheme) that Fregonese milks for anticipatory thrills and reflexive intrigue. Román Viñoly Barreto’s The Beast Must Die (1952) unfolds in a similarly circular manner, beginning with the poisoning of an affluent gangster (Guillermo Battaglia) during a family dinner. Flashing back, we learn that the gangster was involved in a hit-and-run accident that killed the son of a local writer (Narciso Ibáñez Menta), who is now quietly seeking revenge on the “beast” by slowly infiltrating his family. Unabashedly melodramatic, the film (which is based on a novel by the Irish-born, British poet and writer Cecil Day-Lewis, father of actor Daniel) is as lurid as it is convoluted, striking a pleasing balance between stylistic excess and primal emotion.
The same might be said for the films of Kijū Yoshida, an underrecognized master whose messy, volatile, and provocative body of work proved to be a consistent revelation throughout the Viennale. Though known today, if at all, for a trio of radical independent features made in the late-‘60s and early-‘70s—and most especially for the first of these, Eros + Massacre (1969)—Yoshida (whose birth name is Yoshishige Yoshida) in fact started out under contract at Shōchiku alongside fellow Japanese New Wave icons Nagisa Ōshima and Masahiro Shinoda. It’s these films, made over a four-year period at the dawn of the sixties, that first revealed Yoshida’s rebellious streak and knack for salacious subject matter; with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see that his break with the studio system was less a matter of course than it was a clear-cut inevitability. In his first feature, Good-for-Nothing (1960), Yoshida skewers Japan’s postwar idealism and increasingly corporatized culture through a familiar tale of disaffected youth and generational angst. Centered on a group of four layabouts whose leader (Yūsuke Kawazu) is the son of a wealthy businessman, the film meanders between cluttered bedrooms and immaculate office suites, sweltering asphalt streets and dingy watering holes. While the loosely sketched plot, which follows a budding relationship between Jun (Masahiko Tsugawa), the most impressionable of the young men, and the female secretary (Kakuko Chino) of the rich friend’s father, has its share of twists and turns, it’s the film’s enveloping aura and energy that leave the greatest impression. Appropriately atmospheric and steeped in contemporary jazz sounds, Good-for-Nothing has echoes of Godard in its cooly literate and cynical characterizations (not to mention its memorably bleak ending, which riffs directly on Breathless), but it’s the unmistakable air of gleeful nihilism that places it squarely in the cultural moment and milieu that birthed such anarchic works as Kō Nakahira’s Crazed Fruit (1956) and Koreyoshi Kurahara’s The Warped Ones (1960).
18 Roughs (1963).
My two favorite Yoshida discoveries trace the transition between his studio and independent phases. In 18 Roughs (1963), his penultimate Shōchiku production and final fully realized studio project (the following year’s Escape from Japan was cut by the studio and released in compromised form, prompting his exit), the director confronts issues of masculinity, migrant labor practices, and sexual assault in no-nonsense terms unique for any era. With the local labor force on strike, a group of unskilled workers are brought from Osaka to the industrial port town of Kure to take over as ship welders. They respect nothing, let alone the job, and spend most of their downtime drinking, fist-fighting with locals, and “buying women”—an anything-goes attitude that quickly sets off a chain of events (including an unpunished rape) that descend further and further into violence. Yoshida’s filmmaking brawn is here at its most physical and technically acute; nearly every composition is busy with background and foreground information, with actors arrayed in oblique permutations across the frame and a variety of objects (pipes, beads, ropes, curtains) creating a fathomless depth-of-field within and beyond each shot. Compared to this quasi-chaotic construction, the formal elegance of A Story Written with Water (1965), Yoshida’s first independent feature, is nothing less than startling. But while stylistically this Mizoguchi-esque gendaigeki (contemporary-set story) presents a seemingly tamped-down Yoshida, its themes are anything but innocent. A tale of cross-generational incest, the film tells of the slow realization of a young businessman (Yasunori Irikawa) that his jealous mother (Mariko Okada, Yoshida’s wife and long-time collaborator) has been hiding a decades-long relationship with the father (Isao Yamagata) of his fiancé (Ruriko Asaoka), a situation that raises the possibility that the young lovers are in fact siblings. Over a series of slow-burn scenes depicting this fraught interfamily dynamic, Yoshida gradually dispenses with psychology, or even exposition, and eventually arrives at a near-wordless climax set at a lake that embraces ambiguity and existentialism in a manner that soon would become his calling card. As Yoshida is quoted as saying in an interview that was printed and distributed at the festival: “Film is not merely a story…it also has a reflective power.” Here, as in nearly every film presented in this year’s Viennale retrospective, that power is a means to generate thought and provoke a response—something this festival, in its continued efforts to make the invisible visible, not only encourages, but demands.