Austria Plays Itself and Sees Da Him
Notes on the Image of Austria in the Films of Michael Glawogger
by Christoph Huber

Frankreich, wir kommen!

"Shit," says the young man, "I am myself. When you look into the mirror, you see who you are." The young man is one of the car drivers who took along Michael Glawogger on his hitch-hiking tour through Austria for his episode "Die Reise" ("The Journey") in Zur Lage (Österreich in sechs Kapiteln) (State of the Nation: Austria in Six Chapters, 2002), an omnibus effort inspired by the conservative victory in the Austrian elections of 2000. When the film opened in Austria, I wrote that Glawogger's contribution to the film was overshadowed by Ulrich Seidl's and I still think that was justified to some degree. Both directors in essence let people vent their prejudices and disappointments, which leads to a convincing chronicle, but not necessarily in-depth analysis of the perceived right-wing backlash that shocked Austria's cultural scene, and Seidl's gift for confrontational tabula-rasa-still-life-tableaux, in which the ravings of his protagonists seem stripped down to their naked, near-psychotic core, while the baroque beauty of their verbiage-spilling is all the more pronounced, leaves more of an impression. Yet having seen Glawogger's piece again on its own for this article, I'm moved by its floating quality and melancholy tone — shrouded in wet and foggy visuals of the Austrian landscape gliding by, the often similarly frightening and funny declarations of the various car-drivers who picked him up on his 23-day ride through all of Austria acquire a poignant sadness, down to the last stop, an image of a hitch-hiker's hand resignedly dropping out of the frame. (In German it makes for a sly, yet almost mournful pun, since hitch-hiking means "Auto-Stop.") What seemed a lack back then, in hindsight can rather be explained as a problem of the film as a whole, which never quite coheres — case in point is a disastrous third contribution by Michael Sturminger, which attempts pretty much the same thing as Glawogger and Seidl, yet falls totally flat (the fourth episode, in which Barbara Albert strains for a more dialectic approach, seems to belong to another movie entirely).

What Sturminger's attempt lacks, but is on display on abundance in both Seidl's and Glawogger's segments, is personal handwriting and genuine curiosity — which, backhandedly, brings us around to the theme of this piece: how Austria is represented in the films of Glawogger, or — per the name of a former popular newscast in this very country — their "Österreich-Bild" (which would literally translate as "image of Austria"). As with most things in that sometimes maddeningly dialectical complex of Glawogger's filmography, it's something that can't be pinned down easily to serve one point — as proven by "The Journey," which in retrospect seems a much less didactic (admittedly also less dryly stringent) foreboding of the digital-video-method for which Abbas Kiarostami would be hailed only a few months later when his Ten (2002) premiered in Cannes.

What Glawogger draws from his encounters in the confined, yet, through its privacy, "open" space of the inside of various cars, is, by his own admission "the document of a confusion." Private and political concerns mingle: A man's ultra-conservative, extended rant about the "loss of values" in contemporary society, the rise of "homosexual men and other such perversions, . . . the sickness in the heads of people, sickness of physical nature," turns out to be closely related to his personal disappointment as a "failed family-man" — his wife left him with the kids. In a similar vein, the first driver (in a statement that seems to encapsulate the entire film) embarks on his complaint with the disclaimer that he'll probably be "damned as a defeatist"; actually he's using the wonderful, much richer dialect word "Motschkerer," which cannot be adequately translated, but incorporates the very Austrian notion of expressing one's defeatism preferably in long, pissed-off rants — and that is exactly what follows.

Racist and fascist remnants proliferate throughout "The Journey": One driver chides the Eastern European nations, which after World War I "could not wait to escape the people's prison" of the Austro-Hungarian empire, yet now want back (into the European Union), "because life in that people's prison wasn't so bad after all," but the most interesting figure is the young man I quoted in the opening. Like many of Glawogger's interview partners here, he's referring to the bête noire of the film: Jörg Haider, the populist right-winger whose successful rise in Austrian politics (and, most controversially, into a government position in 2000) had much to do with his skillful fueling of precisely such prejudices. Haider, the young man opines, echoing a popular sentiment, may have gone to far on occasion, but is right on many things, especially "foreign infiltration" — way too many aliens in Austria. In a sadly familiar rationale the boy says that Hitler may have had the right ideas back then, "he just shouldn't have exterminated the Jews," but a "more understated method" would have been agreeable. It's after this that things start to get really interesting — and decidedly Glawoggerian: When the young boy talks about his frustrations, the lack of possibilities, which lead him to hang out at cemeteries (a defining recurring motif in Glawogger's "Austrian" films) to forget about the pre-planned life route for his kind — settle down, find a job, and go to the discotheque every Saturday "to drink oneself into stupidity" — he finds a momentary escape in the image of "Da Him." (In a nice coincidence the Austrian dialect word "da" means the same as in hip-hop-slang: "the.")

"Da Him" is shorthand for Ville Hermanni Valo, singer of the then-popular Finnish doom-rockers HIM, and the young guy's resemblance to Valo (whose name incidentally means "light") is lighting up his life: helping to pick up girls, a constant source for inside jokes, and, on occasion, the chance to forget himself. "There was a time when I thought I didn't want to be myself any longer. Shit, I want to be that guy!" Of course, when looking in the mirror, the unavoidable realization of being just oneself after all follows. This accidentally captured moment may — not quite accidentally, given how Glawogger's films undermine common notions of fact and fiction, document and staging — be a key scene in the entire Glawogger oeuvre: In the semi-utopian image of "Da Him" also lies a dialectical realization of the self. It's not the blunt antithesis of "the Other" in which Glawogger's Austria sees itself, but something at the same time more elusive and somewhat closer: Gazing back through Glawogger's work there's a fascinating interplay of similarity and difference at work in the contrapuntal interplay of home and elsewhere. There's Paulus Manker as a hard-drinking poet who regains footing abroad only after having been unwittingly transported over the Austrian border into Czech territory in Slumming (2006). There's the most exemplary comparison by intercutting the reaction of Austrian and the opposing nations' (Cameroon, Chile, Italy) soccer fans reactions (not to mention the strikingly varied tone and degree of enthusiasm of the different commentaries on TV) in the World Cup documentary Frankreich, wir kommen! (France, Here We Come!, 1999). There's the cross-pollination of Austrian ambition and international inspiration (and vice versa) in Kino im Kopf (Movies in the Mind, 1996). And of course, interlaced and in between all this, and decidedly on a more meta level, there's another kind of cross-pollination in tracing auteurial themes and interests through Glawogger's "strictly Austrian" films Nacktschnecken (Slugs, 2004) and Die Ameisenstraße (Ant Street, 1995) and his "global" documentaries Workingman's Death (2005) and Megacities (1998). Also, the mind boggles at the added possibilities if Glawogger had shot his steel factory segment of "Workingman's Death" in Austria's VOEST and not in Anchan, China, which he had considered for some time — that it was bureaucratic problems that ultimately got in the way is in itself a nicely Austrian touch, however. All this can be traced back to Glawogger's first feature-length effort, which — completing another circle rather beautifully — was also a collaboration with Ulrich Seidl, and in its more even-handed mixture of their approaches achieved a more successful superstructure: Krieg in Wien (1989).

The "War in Vienna" which the title announces is in many respects already a decidedly global affair, setting up a hall of mirrors of images crossing borders and producing a dazzling ambiguity of meanings, which seems central to the Glawogger project: A collage of news clips from all over the world interspersed with freshly shot material from home, "Krieg in Wien" startles with its wealth of associations. It kicks off with the (most certainly in Austria) familiar setting of the studio from which the country's big news program is broadcast — and of Horst F. Mayer, then its anchorman, who promises that the news program's duty is "to inform in the most precise and fastest way" possible. But the found footage quickly segues into reports from places as diverse as Korea, Germany, and Africa, proving that in the age of ever-expanding media, information has become a very random thing. The defamiliarizing impact of this material on the Vienna footage invites to ponder ever-more complex meanings and ideas, if one can keep up. "All cities are the same," announces a voice-over, as the camera first glides into town, but indeed the specific aspects of the city soon seem questionable, or at least often: negligible, within the larger context.

While some of the shots carry Seidl's signature, the playful structure seems to anticipate the idea-bombardment characteristic of Glawogger, especially in his other film about generating and generated images, Movies in the Mind. "A movie about News, Life, Love, and Death," announces the opening title, heralding themes that have to varying degrees become even more pronounced in both careers. It also anticipates the ironic-sounding tagline for Slugs, which promised "a moving film about the big themes of life: sex, love, parents, cars, and wild animals," whereas one of the many intertitles that follows will also double — then in English — as the ironic title of Seidl's next film, his breakthrough documentary about newspaper vendors, Good News (1990).  Other text inserts include "News for Happy People" and "War in the Home Country," the latter followed by images of people working out in a fitness center and street traffic.

So the announcement of "War in Vienna" may feel somewhat ironic for quite a while — is it what the media flow brings to daily lives, as recurring topics worldwide like the Iran-Iraq war or the catastrophic ship accident near the Philippines suggest? Or is it the daily struggle itself, keeping afloat in the midst of media bombardment? Near the end, in one of the many humorous juxtapositions, an announcement by Ronald Reagan on TV that "there's a time for hope and optimism" is followed by an interview statement of an Austrian worker that there's so little time, just for the evening walk with his wife, "then I come home, grab a beer, and sit down in front of the box. That is the whole routine." But by that time the tables have already been turned in a most interesting fashion: Long past the movie's midway point a U.S. news report about violent demonstrations by youth in Vienna literalizes the title, after all — the reason being the "Waldheim affair," provoked by the very selective memory of Kurt Waldheim, former secretary-general to the UN and then Austria's president, about his knowledge of war crimes during the Nazi era, when he served as SA officer. This led to his being subsequently put on the US "watch list," among other things — which in turn led to a campaign by Austria's singularly influential reactionary tabloid Kronen Zeitung that successfully roused nationalist non-interference sentiments. (That very tabloid is also a central vending object in "Good News," by the way.)

Pointing towards a very specific Austrian problem (and notions, that, as State of the Nation 13 years later amply proves, have never quite subsided), this crucial scene anchors the kaleidoscopic film, whose onslaught of material otherwise suggests a product of the proliferating visual media. (It was only during the '80s that the widespread introduction of cable TV brought on the fast multiplication of channels in Austria.) In retrospect, the film has only gained in substantive richness, its quick-paced mosaic approach a harbinger of what's to come, not to mention the moment when Horst F. Mayer declares (about newscasting) that "however, we cannot influence it the way we would like to" — a statement that must have seemed quite face-value-believable then, when the "official" state-sponsored TV still was held in high regard as a quasi-autonomous source (and especially its presentation of news, with Mayer then being "the face" of its integrity) vis-à-vis the sensationalist tendencies of privately financed stations. These days, the difference often is hard to tell — something that the tumultuous Krieg in Wien anticipates with merciless clarity.

Starting with a protagonist obsessively counting (his steps home) over the still-black screen, Glawogger's first fiction feature, Ant Street, establishes a key theme of the director's work that appeared submerged in the previous film: that life is not quantifiable. Significantly, other characters include a watchmaker obsessed with time, a young kid who pierces and collects insects (Glawogger stresses the motif by occasionally resorting to the presentation of objects in pronouncedly display-case-like arrangements), and a narrator who spends much time building and pondering a model of the house in the titular street they all live in, always stressing that "one has to be prepared." That he "disappears" for himself by closing his eyes and for the audience in a trompe-l'oeil effect recently used again prominently in Garden State, where the protagonist's clothing is identical to the wallpaper (both here, of course, with ant patterns), give a taste of Glawogger's slightly surrealist leanings, but Ant Street seems most important for being an Austrian comedy that actually bears a semblance to reality. By the mid-'90s, the genre was already falling firmly in the hands of stars coming from the stage: The Austrian "Kabarett," which is not exactly cabaret, but a kind of stand-up-comedy, often leaning towards "filmic" (and definitely film-inspired) one-man performances, had brought on an exaggerated tone, fueled by a lowbrow-gags-at-any-price-concept, that mostly left little room for even the most remote claims of any similarity to life as we know it.

In its aggressively assertive music track and the repeated stretching for punch lines, Ant Street is slightly tainted by these tendencies, resulting in an occasional artificiality that — given the free-spirited nature of his later work — by now marks it as decidedly minor, yet still amusing Glawogger. Especially in Slugs he has made good on the genuinely tragicomic promise of this film, which then seemed like a miraculous fresh breath (and whose down-to-earth sense for cleverly stylized décor, less for decorum, is still impressive): Its slightly overcrowded plot structure — after the owner of the house in Ant Street dies, it's pretty much everybody against everybody (but especially against the house's heir who wants to drive out the residents and make the estate object more lucrative — for him) — even channels the last previous official highlight of Austrian comedy, the TV series Kottan ermittelt (which translates as "Kottan investigates"; during the course of its increasingly daffy seven-year runtime it was always directed by Peter Patzak and written by Helmut Zenker). The series' magnificent first episode, "Hartlgasse 16a" (1976), was similarly named after the tenement it mostly took place in, with the anti-hero, police detective Kottan (in the beginning played with melancholy overtones by the incomparable Peter Vogel), investigating a murder amidst residents who were always prone to prove the proverbial perfidy that lurks in the "Golden Viennese Heart." The arguments and mishaps in Ant Street also lead to some memorably morbid demises — always commemorated with an intertitle "plaque" featuring name, birth, and death dates. Then again, the notoriously macabre Viennese sense of humor also manifests itself, for instance, in the presence of an elderly citizen with hearing aid who smilingly, eyes twitching, sits in front of the television, immersed in an undoubtedly eventful live report from Vienna's great cemetery, the legendary "Zentrafriedhof."

Even in a completely high-spirited work like France, Here We Come!, the return to the cemetery seems unavoidable: Here, one of the soccer fans chosen as main protagonists regularly visits the grave of his father, who — some 60 years back in the golden age of Austrian football — introduced him to one of the nation's great soccer idols, Mathias Sindelar, the legendary "Man of Paper." The elderly fan is dutifully recounting the fate of the Austrian team at the France FIFA World Cup in 1998 to the deceased — not a pleasant task under any circumstances, since the national team's disappointing performance led to a rather deserved demise after the first stage's group round-robin. Of course, the true soccer fan — Glawogger being a prime example, as the buoyant tone of his film proves — will be crushed only temporarily by such a disaster. Indeed, the cemetery visitor ends his report with looking forward to the next World Cup as another chance. (That Austria hasn't managed to even qualify ever since, is of course quite another issue.) A more grounded approach is guaranteed the film's co-writer, Austrian sport journalist Johann Skocek, whose philosophical comments, wearily spoken into a video camera in his French hotel room late at night, show some critical distance — in fact one of his first statements is: "This rubbish hasn't started yet, and already I'm completely tired." Skocek's funny and analytical meditations — a particular highlight is when he explains how (Austria's national trainer) Herbert Prohaska "would have to build a gothic cathedral, yet he's only a bricklayer . . . who can no longer find the building site" — are in stark contrast to the reactions of the other soccer-savvy main characters, including a probably alcoholic retiree, an accountant who has devotedly followed his team of choice for years, always dragging along his mom, and, most moving and most typical of Glawogger, a blind man, who nevertheless seems to imbibe every detail of the game.

Blindness here is otherwise, as usual, mostly something the referees are accused of, especially when their verdict is anti-Austrian and a multitude of angry voices are raised in pubs and homes: Similarly, France, Here We Come! is constantly piling up material, rising to the media-saturated occasion, its polyphonic structure paying off especially when the confrontation on the field yields even richer confrontations of cultures. Cutting between the continents, Glawogger juxtaposes the reactions of Austrian fans with those of the opposing nations — and while some things, not least the ardor and excitement, are similar around the world, the differences between the game annotators alone are telling enough: mostly desperate in Austria, but poetic in Cameroon ("the Austrian aristocrats . . . cropped our wings"), ecstatically febrile in Chile ("we have to believe in this team . . . this will be the longest three minutes of our lives"), first self-assured, then unusually unsettled in Italy — after all, in that game, the last one, the Austrian players for once do better. Ironically, it's also the one only match they lose, after managing to score even only during injury time in their first two, disappointingly defensive stands. "The beautiful game was our death," Skocek muses afterwards.

Tellingly, the Austrian fans also apply a defensive, self-depreciating strategy throughout, justifying the film's subtitle as a "drama in three acts." In the end, they take comfort in their fate, since the last game gives "reason to be proud of our team," and it's all explained as not having had the luck which is always bestowed "only on the Germans" (who in the history of Austrian soccer have always served as the existentially, it seems, favored and much-maligned "big brother.") This pleasure in "noble" resignation, typical of the Austrian penchant for self-pity, is only the most pronounced critical aspect Glawogger cunningly captures; others often seem to have gone unnoticed due to the frenzied temper of the film: Choice bits include the traditionally patriarchal circumstances of soccer-watching (at home, the woman has to prepare everything while the men look and talk knowingly) and the sport as springboard for nationalist sentiments (again, it's — what else? — the Kronen Zeitung that takes the cake, featuring the front-page caption "Ivo, now you're really an Austrian!" after legionnaire Ivica "Ivo" Vastic, recently nationalized for World Cup eligibility, scores the last-minute balance against Chile). In a masterstroke, the last bit of the crowded music track perfectly captures the Austrian spirit of hope-in-the-face-of-deeply-savored-despair: It's Creedence Clearwater Revival's "As Long as I Can See the Light."

No less brilliant is the intricate interplay of comedy and secretly accumulating sadness in Slugs, which must be seen as Glawogger's true Heimatfilm, with the director's typical wit conceived as a recourse to one of our nation's most detested mainstays of commercial cinema in the '60s and '70s: the lowbrow sex comedy, which itself often took place within the earlier Heimatfilm's regional backgrounds. A kind of Styrian slacker movie (which does wonders with the special tone of the regional idiom), it doesn't cut slack on the protagonist's illusions, even as it deeply empathizes with them: The all-too-perfect dream of horny students to balance their budget by shooting a sex movie is determined to fail, since the only thing that really works is their camera. Just as the redevelopment plans in Ant Street ultimately resulted in revealing disaster, the more benevolent, yet never sentimental or misguidedly faux-humanist Slugs unearths deep truths in a deceptively light manner. Despite the acknowledgement of tragedy, it also stands alone as a triumphantly comical treatment of themes — not least among them sex itself — that have been a wellspring of depression in the increasingly cliché-threatened bulk of contemporary Austrian cinema. And, as Glawogger's most recent, and again, in that miraculously unpretentious manner, truly complex effort proves, this singular stance is happily Slumming on.

Originally published by the Lisbon International Independent Film Festival.

Christoph Huber
© FIPRESCI 2006

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