Primer. New Austrian Film.

"[T]he salient quality of Austrian film's new wave is its willingness to confront the abject and emphasize the negative," Dennis Lim wrote in the New York Times late last year. "In recent years this tiny country has become something like the world capital of feel-bad cinema." At the same time, Austria has become "home to the emerging genre of the intercontinental documentary: travelogues with a global awareness and the frequent-flier miles to show for it." What's more, as Ed Halter noted in the Voice some time back, "Austria has produced some of the finest experimental cinema of the past 50 years."

All three strands are woven into Robert von Dassanowsky's latest primer, "New Austrian Film," which picks up where his "Austrian Film to 2000" left off.

Posted by dwhudson at June 11, 2007 3:00 PM