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Essential Austrian Cinema

Invisible Adversaries (1978)
Valie Export · 4 critic votes
Streaming on OVID
Anna, an artist, is obsessed with the invasion of alien doubles bent on total destruction. Her schizophrenia is reflected in the juxtapositions of long movie camera takes with violently edited montages: private with public spaces; black & white with colour, still photographs with video, earsplitting sounds with disruptive camera angles. Anna uses her body like a map; after a devastating quarrel with her lover, she paints red stitches on herself. Watching their scenes together, we realize how seldom, if ever before, the details of sexual intimacy have been shown in film from the point of view from a woman. Export privileges rupture over unity and never settles for one-dimensional solutions
Funny Games (1997)
Michael Haneke · 3 critic votes
Free on Tubi TV, Shout! Factory TV · Streaming on Criterion Channel, HBO Max Amazon Channel, HBO Max
Two psychotic young men take a mother, father, and son hostage in their vacation cabin and force them to play sadistic "games" with one another for their own amusement.
Film Is (1998)
Gustav Deutsch · 3 critic votes
Film ist. 1-6 is an avant-garde collage from Gustav Deutsch, using found footage from various scientific films to explore the properties, impact and nature of film.
Outer Space (1999)
Peter Tscherkassky · 3 critic votes
Streaming on MUBI, DocAlliance Films
A young woman move towards a house that holds a potentially dangerous spirit that has been tormenting her. The woman tries to fight against the film itself as it starts to cause the world to collapse.
Adebar (1957)
Peter Kubelka · 2 critic votes
Adebar is the first of Peter Kubelka's 'metric films', in which every element of the composition is precisely ordered and in relation to the gestalt. The film is made up of single units---13, 26 and 52 frames long---which are subjected to a complex rule-system, including a strict use of positive and negative space, that determines their structure within the film.
Schwechater (1958)
Peter Kubelka · 2 critic votes
In 1957, Peter Kubelka was hired to make a short commercial for Schwechater beer. The beer company undoubtedly thought they were commissioning a film that would help them sell their beers; Kubelka had other ideas. He shot his film with a camera that did not even have a viewer, simply pointing it in the general direction of the action. He then took many months to edit his footage, while the company fumed and demanded a finished product. Finally he submitted a film, 90 seconds long, that featured extremely rapid cutting (cutting at the limits of most viewers' perception) between images washed out almost to the point of abstraction — in black-and-white positive and negative and with red tint — of dimly visible people drinking beer and of the froth of beer seen in a fully abstract pattern.
Arnulf Rainer (1960)
Peter Kubelka · 2 critic votes
An experimental film, the last in Peter Kubelka's trilogy of “metric films”. Each frame of Arnulf Rainer is composed of darkness or light and silence or sound.
Angst (1983)
Gerald Kargl · 2 critic votes
Streaming on Night Flight Plus, Midnight Pulp, Midnight Pulp Amazon Channel
A killer is released from prison and breaks into a remote home to kill a woman, her handicapped son and her pretty daughter.
The Seventh Continent (1989)
Michael Haneke · 2 critic votes
Streaming on Criterion Channel
Chronicles three years of a middle-class family seemingly caught up in their daily routines, troubled only by minor incidents. Behind their apparent calm and repetitive existence, however, they're planning something much more sinister.
Wolff von Amerongen: Did he commit bankruptcy offences? (2004)
Gerhard Friedl · 2 critic votes
Germany's economic movers and shakers get a thorough going-over in Friedl's docu-fiction hybrid, which doesn't hesitate to point fingers at those partially responsible for Europe's financial woe.
Paradise: Love (2012)
Ulrich Seidl · 2 critic votes
Free on Tubi TV, Fandango at Home Free
On the beaches of Kenya they’re known as "Sugar Mamas" —European women who seek out African boys selling love to earn a living. Teresa, a 50-year-old Austrian and mother of a daughter entering puberty, travels to this vacation paradise, moving from beach to beach.
Great Freedom (2021)
Sebastian Meise · 2 critic votes
Streaming on MUBI, MUBI Amazon Channel
In post-war Germany, liberation by the Allies does not mean freedom for everyone. Hans Hoffmann is repeatedly imprisoned under Paragraph 175, which criminalizes homosexuality. Nevertheless, over the decades, he continues his quest for freedom and love, even if he finds it in the most unusual places.
We Are Not Children (1934)
Augusto Genina · 1 critic vote
In the spring of 1913, Jean Servin, a son of a family, became friends with Roberte, a little midinette. He leaves her a few months later to marry Cécile Breton. The years go by. Jean becomes an important businessman. One evening, he meets Roberte, who has become the wife of a wealthy American. She does not love her husband any more than he loves his wife. They recall their memories. They seem to still love each other. They plan to rebuild their lives. Together, they will spend a few days in Dieppe, as they did in the past after their first meeting. They feel so different from what they were twenty years ago that they understand that the past cannot live again.
Hold, Sun! (1959)
Ferry Radax · 1 critic vote
A sailor appears at the port of Buenos Aires, and at the same time as a dandy in Fegina, the “Riviera” of Monterosso al Mare (double-role: Konrad Bayer). Through a kind of “inner monologue” both are dependent on one another in a cryptic way. An elegant, cool beauty (Suzanna Hockenjos) becomes bored with the dandy, causing him to suddenly (in order to impress her?) shoot the sun from the sky, which produces a very erotic Eve (Ingrid Schuppan), but gives nothing more to the dandy. Thereupon, he further knocks down the moon, but this spectacle also bores the cool blonde. Incensed about this, the dandy destroys his entire strange world. In doing so, he loses Eve. Grief regarding her death and despair regarding the unwelcoming lady turns the dandy back to a sailor. He returns to the sea.
Our Trip to Africa (1966)
Peter Kubelka · 1 critic vote
Originally commissioned by an Austrian couple in 1961 to photograph a travel diary documenting their wild game hunt, Kubelka shot three hours of film and recorded fourteen hours of audio. Over the next few years, Kubelka toiled in the editing bay, producing a work charged with intricate, ironic brutality.
31/75: Asylum (1975)
Kurt Kren · 1 critic vote
A meadow, a lake, the silhouette of a hill, trees. 21 days of the same view in Saarland. 21 days with five different cut-outs in a mask before the camera, which finally reveals a complete panorama. The landscape changes with the advancing seasons and becomes slowly delirious in its technical alienation.
Pixote (1980)
Héctor Babenco · 1 critic vote
Streaming on Criterion Channel
10-year-old Pixote endures torture, degradation, and corruption at a local youth detention center where two of its members are murdered by policemen who frame Lilica, a 17-year-old trans hustler. Pixote helps Lilica and three other boys escape and they start to make their living by a life of crime which only escalates to more violence and death.
71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)
Michael Haneke · 1 critic vote
Streaming on Criterion Channel
71 scenes revolving around multiple Viennese residents who are by chance involved with a senseless gun slaughter on Christmas Eve.
Passages (1996)
Lisl Ponger · 1 critic vote
Lisl Ponger creates an imaginary map of the twentieth century on which the stories of emigration are engraved like well-worn tracks of occidental memory. The pictures, made by observant tourists, are revealed, in their tensile relationship to the soundtrack, as a post-colonial journey. A journey through exactly those countries which long ago have been shrunk together in space and time. Finally the wonderful neon signs of the “Hotel Edison” and “Radio City” remind one of the origins of this form of appropriation of the world, of the time of great expeditions, of Benjamin‘s shop-windows and passages, and of the time when technical apparatus and means of transportation fundamentally altered the perceptions of modern man.
Dandy Dust (1998)
Hans Scheirl · 1 critic vote
Dust, a split-personality cyborg of fluid gender, zooms through time and space in search of their own memories and a sense of understanding. They travel from the Planet of White Dust where war is constant, to the Planet of Blood and Swelling, a hybrid of their father’s body.
France, We’re Coming! (1998)
Michael Glawogger · 1 critic vote
FRANKREICH WIR KOMMEN is a highly enjoyable documentary, obviously intended for TV, but showing at film festivals. It shows us the highlights of the 1998 World Cup Championships in France through the eyes of several interesting and diverse fans of the Austrian national team. Entertaining, even for those not interested in football.
Contact High (2009)
Michael Glawogger · 1 critic vote
Gangster boss Carlos orders the dodgy Viennese junkyard owner Harry to bring him a bag from Poland. Harry passes the order on to his "best man" Schorsch. Schorsch, not exactly the brightest, is currently without a driver's license and completely fixated on the 24-hour car race of Le Mans. So he gives the order to Mao and sends in their place the takeaway lessees Hans and Max to Poland. Their journey leads to a seemingly endless drug trip full of extraordinary phenomena.
Shirley - Visions of Reality (2013)
Gustav Deutsch · 1 critic vote
Free on JustWatch TV, Tubi TV, The Roku Channel · Streaming on Fandor Amazon Channel, Hoopla, fuboTV
A series of snapshots from the life of a fictional actress named Shirley serves to weave together thirteen paintings by Edward Hopper (e.g. "Office at Night", "Western Motel", "Usherette", "A Woman in the Sun") into a fascinating synthesis of painting and film, personal and political history. Each station in Shirley’s professional and private life from the 1930s to 1960s is precisely dated: It is always August 28/29 of the year in question, as the locations vary from Paris to New York to Cape Cod.
Not Even Nothing Can Be Free Of Ghosts (2016)
Rainer Kohlberger · 1 critic vote
Rainer Kohlberger’s abstract film was created entirely without a camera. Through digital algorithms, he precisely arranged a rhythm of light and shadow that pulsates off the screen into our physical space with blinding intensity. The presence of light is almost felt as we are sucked into the image to become its ghostly accomplice. As we leave the theatre, the optical vibrations continue to haunt us.
The Dreamed Ones (2016)
Ruth Beckermann · 1 critic vote
Streaming on GuideDoc, DocAlliance Films, myfilmfriend
It’s not uncommon for a film to have a moving love story at its core. Yet this particular set-up is unusual. The lovers here are Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, both important representatives of post-war German-language poetry. The story of the relationship between the Austrian and the Jew from Czernowitz is told through their nearly 20-year correspondence (1948–1967). Or, more precisely, by a young woman and a young man reading from their letters in a studio in Vienna’s venerable Funkhaus.
Untitled (2017)
Michael Glawogger, Monika Willi · 1 critic vote
Streaming on myfilmfriend
More than two years after the sudden death of Michael Glawogger in April 2014, film editor Monika Willi realizes a film out of the film footage produced during 4 months and 19 days of shooting in the Balkans, Italy, Northwest and West Africa. A journey into the world to observe, listen and experience, the eye attentive, courageous and raw. Serendipity is the concept - in shooting as well as in editing the film.
It Has To Be Lived Once and Dreamed Twice (2019)
Rainer Kohlberger · 1 critic vote
In the sixth great mass mortality of the earth, humankind became extinct. Their technology had recently progressed so far as to deconstruct the algorithms of evolution and allow artificial life to develop on Earth.
Singing in Oblivion (2021)
Eve Heller · 1 critic vote
Streaming on DocAlliance Films
"Vienna’s Jewish Währinger cemetery opened to the public in 1784, during an era of tolerance and prosperity that eventually coincided with the dawn of photography. With the rise of Nazism, this historical jewel of a Biedermeier cemetery was variously desecrated and became an overgrown wilderness, though passersby noted it sounded as if a paradise of birds was locked behind its high stone walls. The graveyard today bears further scars of political and inertial neglect. Without the care of generations displaced or killed during the Nazi era, graves have been decimated by the falling branches and uncontrolled growth of ancient trees while the words and symbols on tombstones disappear into dust. Singing in Oblivion interweaves footage shot on location with images painstakingly lifted from antique glass negatives and printed one frame at a time in a darkroom onto 35mm film strips." - Eve Heller
Corsage (2022)
Marie Kreutzer · 1 critic vote
Free on Tubi TV, Plex, Plex Channel · Streaming on Sundance Now, Kanopy, AMC+
A fictional account of one year in the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. On Christmas Eve 1877, Elisabeth, once idolized for her beauty, turns 40 and is officially deemed an old woman; she starts trying to maintain her public image.
Revolution of the Eyes (2022)
Friederike Pezold · 1 critic vote
Pezold is quite serious when she calls for a revolution of the eyes. In our depressingly digital day-in day-out, we have unlearned how to see; we merely register a restless flow of data. But looking, watching means something else: it means appreciating what's in front of us, taking the time to let a presence unfold its meaning(s). Quietness helps. And so, with Revolution der Augen, we are invited to return to the origins of cinema and its initial promises, with the experience and knowledge gained through all kinds of media over some six score years. It's tabula rasa time!
Henry Fonda for President (2025)
Alexander Horwath · 1 critic vote
A personal essay about the United States viewed through the life and work of the late American film and stage actor Henry Fonda.

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Essential Austrian Cinema

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