49/95 Tausendjahrekino and more

49/95 Tausendjahrekino

1995. Austria. Directed by Kurt Kren. The secret cinematic link between Vienna and the Lone Star State doesn’t stop with Richard Linklater and cinematographer Lee Daniel’s deeply romantic take on the city. During the Vienna production of Before Sunrise in the summer of 1994, the two Texans often met with an old friend, Kurt Kren, an Austrian avant-garde filmmaker whom they revered and whose “Vienna of the mind” was a world apart from the Ophulsian dreamscape they were trying to create. Kren had left Austria for good following an infamous 1968 court case against the Viennese Actionists; at his darkest moment on the road, he was saved by curator Ralph McKay, who found him a job as a museum guard in Houston. When Austria came calling again in the late 1980s, Kren had spent almost a decade as a fixture of the indie film-and-music scene in Texas. His bit part in Before Sunrise ended up on the cutting-room floor (soon to be recovered, we hope, by a dogged archivist at Warner Bros.). But during that same summer, Kren also began to shoot Tausendjahrekino, film number 49 and one of the last in his own oeuvre. Made for cinema’s centenary, this is a film about facing the world with a camera glued to your eyes: flickering flocks of tourists in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, accompanied by the words and sounds of a 1945 air raid as heard in Peter Lorre’s postwar classic The Lost One. Short in stature but giants of their craft, Kren and Lorre still walk among us—spectral presences who continue to remind us that the glorious century of cinema will always be marked by the “Thousand Year Empire” that passed in its midst. Courtesy sixpackfilm. 3 min.

Before Sunrise

1995. USA. Directed by Richard Linklater. Screenplay by Linklater, Kim Krisan. With Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy. See how it all began, 18 years ago: that fateful encounter between Celine (Delpy) and Jesse (Hawke) on a train bound for Vienna, leading in Ophulsian fashion to a tender night of soul-searching conversation throughout the winding streets of the city—comic, tentative, resigned, fractious, uncertain—and a first kiss that recalls the illusory romance of Lisa (Joan Fontaine) and Stefan (Louis Jourdan) in Letter from an Unknown Woman. Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke reunited in 2004 for the film’s sequel, Before Sunset, and in 2013 brought their trilogy of love (and other difficulties) to an immensely satisfying and poignant conclusion in Before Midnight. Courtesy Warner Bros. 101 min.