Shorts by Lisl Ponger, John Smith, and Michaela Grill and Martin Siewart

Includes the following films:

Welt Spiegel Kino [Part 1]

2005. Austria. Written and directed by Gustav Deutsch. Courtesy sixpackfilm. 30 min.

Cityscapes

2007. Austria. Directed by Michaela Grill, Martin Siewart. Courtesy The Austrian Film Museum. 16 min.

Worst Case Scenario

2001–03. Great Britain. Directed by John Smith. Courtesy John Smith and Lux. 18 min.

Phantom fremdes Wien

2005. Austria. Directed by Lisl Ponger. In manifold ways, these four short films reshape our ideas of Vienna by making the city “strange”—to use a term made famous by the 1920s Russian formalists. Part 1 of Gustav Deutsch’s found-footage triptych Welt Spiegel Kino takes place in the Vienna of 1912. Deutsch uses (and slows-down) an archival film document—a long pan across a street in front of a suburban movie theater—and with the use of additional footage from the era, speculates about the private lives and imminent future of various passers-by. Blending historical fact with cinematic imagination, Deutsch evokes the precipitous moment when Habsburg Belle Époque life would give way to cataclysmic world war. Cityscapes is a semi-abstract work of visual and musical impressionism, haunted by the ghosts of pre-1938 images of Vienna. In Worst Case Scenario, John Smith’s camera looks down onto a busy Viennese intersection and a corner bakery, the filmmaker observing that “as Sigmund Freud casts his long shadow across the city, an increasingly improbable chain of events and relationships starts to emerge.” And in her film of “phantoms,” visual artist and filmmaker Lisl Ponger creates an essay about the order of cultures: The Super-8 images and sound recordings that she took in the early 1990s of several non-Austrian communities in Vienna (the “foreign” city of the title) are shaped by an anti-essentialist, anti-“Family of Man” sensibility. Courtesy sixpackfilm. 28 min.