Nowhere City

Vienna 17, Schumanngasse, Hans Scheugl
1967, 16mm, 3 min

Flora, Jessica Hausner
1996, 35mm, 25 min

Air Spaces, Fridolin Schönwiese
1990, 16mm, 24 min

Feeling Dobermann, Gabriele Mathes
2015, DCP, 16 min

NOWHERE CITY
Vienna is not imagined or depicted as a distinctive place in these filmic works. An inhospitable dimension that suggests narrow social conditions comes to the fore. Hans Scheugl drives along Schumanngasse on a gloomy day; the end and beginning of the film are identical to the end and beginning of the alley. In Flora by Jessica Hausner, the petit bourgeois circumstances force the young protagonist to break out of her parents' house. In this no-frills study of the milieu, the protagonist's wishes and desires are bitterly disappointed until the liberating final act. The horror of the World War comes to life again in Schönwiese's cinematic survey of Vienna's fortified flak towers, combined with an exciting sound design. The horror of the nuclear family with its repressed aggression and competitive relationships oscillates between fiction and reality in Gabriele Mathes' intimate play Dobermann. (Brigitta Burger-Utzer)