The Austrian film week starts in Beijing today and will last for about a week till April 23. All the eleven films shown have either English or Chinese subtitles and are free of charge. One of Austria's most important film directors Barbara Albert will come to Beijing and will take part in open panels. The films will be shown at Peking University (Beijing Daxue) and Hezi Ba (Space of Imagination), which is near the west gate of Tsinghua University. These are the concise introduction of the films:
FRITZ LANG: METROPOLIS (1926)
Set around the year 2000 (then a lifetime away in the future), a mammoth city is ruled by the super-efficient Joh Fredersen and, on the surface, appears to be a utopian dream with wealthy inhabitants living in palatial apartments set in colossal glass and concrete spires.
But underground it is a different story; armies of slaves gruelling shifts to maintain the luxurious lifestyles of their masters. The workers, a subhuman species of sluggish creatures are led by the "saintly" Maria, who urges them not to rebel but to wait patiently for the arrival of the "Mediator". Frederson kidnapps Maria and orders mad scientist Rotwang to create a robot replica to take her place. His plan nis doomed when the evil mechanical Maria incites the massed workers to revolt and destroy everything in sight.
STEFAN RUZOWITZKY: THE INHERITORS (1997)
A village in Austria's Muehlviertel region between the world wars: Seven farm hands inherit their dead master's farm. Something like this has never happened before.
While the "one-seventh" farmers learn to live in freedom and be responsible for themselves, the animosity felt by the older local farmers towards these free youngn servants and their leaders, Lucas and Emmy, grows.
The situation escalates, resulting in violence, destruction and mob justice.
MICHAEL HANEKE: FUNNY GAMES (1997)
At the beginning, things seem just a little strange. Later, violence follows. The ending offers salvation. This is the classic sequence and condition of the thriller genre. For Anna, Georg and their young son, summer holidays begin like a genre film.
At the end, everything turns out differently.
MICHAEL HANEKE: THE PIANO TEACHER (2001)
Erika Kohut, in her late thirties, and a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, lives with her tyrannical elderly mother in a hermetically sealed world of love-hate and dependency in which there is no room for men. Her sex life consists of voyeurism and masochistic self-injury. Then one of Erika's pupils decides to seduce his teacher.
BARBARA ALBERT: NORTHERN SKIRTS (1998)
Austria, 1995. Jasmin, Tamara, Roman, Senad and Valentin, five young people of various ethnic backgrounds, meet in Vienna and share their lives, dreams and wishes for a short time. They all try to find their happiness in their own way -- either alone, in pairs of two, and occasionally in harmony, sometimes in conflict with themselves and sometimes in conflict with each other. Living on the north side of the city between temporary jobs, unwanted pregnancies, suppressed memories of the war in Yugoslavia, and the task of protecting Austria's border with force, these five young people try to give each other moral support and warmth. Though often clumsy in expression themselves and their emotions, they are filled with the need to love and be loved until their lives take them in different directions.
BARBARA ALBERT: FREE RADICALS (2004)
The chaos theory is applied to the daily life of a group of random individuals when a butterfly beating wings set off a tornado above the Gulf of Mexico which causes the crash of an airplane leaving for Europe. A single passenger survives: Manu, a young woman of 24. Five years later she is living in a small town in Austria, working in a local supermarket. The circle of people around her, in addition to her husband, daughter, brothers, sisters and friends, expands according to the people she meets, new and old acquaintances, deliberately sought out or accidentally encountered. This fabric of interweaving lives creates a constant flux of cause and effect. Depending on the decisions taken by individuals, destinies change, making happiness a chance away from being misfortune
ULRICH SEIDL: DOG DAYS (2000)
Weekend at the time of the dog days, on the outskirts of Vienna. It is hot and sultry in that no-man's land somewhere between the expressway and motorway approach roads -- between the hypermarkts and estates of single family homes. Record highs are expected. Underpants, bikinis or even birthday-suits are on the clothing order of the day. People are loosing their cool and aggression is heating up. Here in six interwoven stories unravelling the fragments of Jo Ordinary's day, Ulrich Seidl continues his narrative tradition in a first excursion into the world of fiction.
The nights are filled with drinking games, sex and violence. The days are filled with a sense of lost love, yearning for love and their impossibility.
It is a weekend full of ordinary catastrophes.
ULRICH SEIDL: THE BOSSOM FRIEND (1997)
Renatus is forty and lives with his mother. He gave up his profession as a high school teacher for mathematics and physics years ago because teaching "got on his nerves", as he says.
Renatus is a very sensitive man with distinct sexual phantasies. Entangled in his obsessions for years he successively dissociates from his normal life andn abandoned himself to his phantasies.
For Renatus has spent years with Senta Berger -- not really with her or at her side, but "theoretically and in mind" as he says. Senta Berger was the love of his youth, the object of his desires and his dreams. For Renatus, Senta Berger represented the ideals of a motherly type of woman which he desired like an addict. He watched her films a hundred times and kissed her image a thousand times. All his erotic wishes have been projected on this full-bosomed woman but remain unfilled until today.
ULRICH SEIDL: ANIMAL LOVE (1995)
In concurbations where hundreds of thousands live alongside one another, in the era of a highly technological society, in which communication has never played such a significant role, man has become lonely. Disappointed by his fellow human beings, he turns to animals.
Dogs and other domestic animals serve him as companions, life partners, cuddly objects and bedfellows.
ANDRE HELLER: BLIND SPOT. HITLER'S SECRETARY (2003)
In 1942, Traudl Junge was an apolitical 22-year-old chosen from a clerical pool to work as onen of Adolf Hitler's private secretaries. Working day-in, day-out for Hitler, Junge viewed him as a surrogate father figure, private and polite, nothing like the crazed rhetoriciann of his speeches. Shielded from the knowledge of Hitler's atrocity and convinced seh was in the center of information, she was actually in a blind spot. As the Nazi regime teetered on destruction and Hitler plunged further into madness, Junge witnessed everything up to final chaotic days in the bunker.
BARBARA ALBERT, MICHAEL GLAWOGGER, ULRICH SEIDL, MICHAEL STURMINGER: STATE OF THE NATION (2002)
In the wake of the recent change of power in Austria, four film makers set out to conduct a cinematic survey of Austria, each in his or her own way. The purpose was to document the political and social state of the nation and its people. In the course of their quest for microcosmic revelations, the four encountered people whose lives are compounded of both private and political dimensions.
Performance Details:
April 23:
Venue: Peking University, Filmclub, Sport Stadion, Room 54, Multimedia Room
Show: 6 pm: Barbara Albert, Michael Glawogger, Ulrich Seidl: State of the Nation (2001);
8 pm: Stefan Ruzowitzky: The inheritors (1997)
April 24
Venue: Hezi Ba (Space of Imagination)
Tele: 62791280
Show: 7 p.m: Michael Haneke: The piano teacher (2001)
April 25
Venue: Peking University
Show: 6 p.m: Andre Heller: Hitler's Secretary (2002)
8 p.m.: Barbara Albert: Northern Skirts (1998)
April 26
Venue: Hezi Ba (Space of Imagination) 62791280
Show: 6 p.m: Fritz Lang: Metropolis (1926)
8 p.m.: Stefan Ruzowitzky: The inheritors (1997)
April 27
Venue: Hezi Ba (Space of Imagination)
Tele: 62791280
Show: 6 pm: Ulrich Seidl: Dog Days (2000)
8 pm: Michael Haneke: Funny Games (1997)
April 28
Hezi Ba (Space of Imagination)
Tele：62791280
Show: 7 pm: Barbara Albert: Northern Skirts (1998) shown in the presence of B. Albert with subsequent discussion
April 29
Venue: Peking University
Show: 7 pm: Barbara Albert: Free Radicals (2004) shown in the presence of the director with subsequent discussion
April 30
Venue: Hezi Ba (Space of Imagination)
Tele: 62791280
Show: 6 pm: Ulrich Seidl: The Bosom Friend (1997)
8 pm: Ulrich Seidl: Animal Love (1995)
For further information:
13671051069/62757308/13521652913
(China.org.cn April 23, 2004)
