Alexander Horwath - Böcker

In his 1929 Hollywood production The Case of Lena Smith, director Josef von Sternberg vividly brought to life his youthful memories of the turn of the 20th century through the story a young woman fighting the oppressive class system of Imperial Vienna. Critic Dwight Macdonald called it “the most completely satisfying American film I have seen.” And yet, only a short fragment survives. Assembling 150 original stills and set designs, numerous script and production documents and essays by eminent film historians, the book reconstructs one of the legendary lost masterpieces of the American cinema. It also includes essays by Janet Bergstrom, Gero Gandert, Franz Grafl, Alexander Horwath, Hiroshi Komatsu and Michael Omasta, a preface by Meri von Sternberg, as well as contemporary reviews and excerpts from Viennese literature of the era.

This is a three-volume set about the founding, the 50-year history, and the collections of the Austrian Film Museum. Volume 1 (in German) is a work of historical research, describing in detail the establishment and development of the institution—from postwar Viennese film culture and its protagonists to the tenth anniversary of the Film Museum in 1974. Volume 2 (in German, with some parts in English) extends the time-frame to the year 2014 and offers a richly illustrated anthology of essays, documents, memoirs, and correspondence. It highlights the major retrospectives staged by the Film Museum over a period of 50 years and celebrates many of the visiting artists as well as the writers who contributed to the museum's international recognition and to its curatorial positions. Volume 3 (in German) focuses on the museum's holdings by picturing and describing 50 objects from various subfields of the collectionVand suggesting a non-dogmatic reading of film history.

A richly illustrated anthology of memories, documents and essays on the 50-year history of the Austrian Film Museum, founded in 1964. The book highlights the major retrospectives staged over the past five decades and celebrates many of the visiting artists as well as the writers who contributed to the Museum's international recognition – or to its curatorial positions. The newly commissioned pieces range from literary texts and brief flashes of remembrance to extended discussions of certain aspects of film culture. A decade-by-decade, year-by year, month-by-month chronicle of all programs also runs through the book.

The collections of the Austrian Film Museum feature a wide range of artworks, objects, apparatus and historical documents. Picturing and describing 50 artifacts from these collections, the book suggests a non-dogmatic reading of film history. The 50 selected items represent a rough timeline, from the pre-cinematic moving image arts to pixelized film grain, tracing a material culture deeply entangled with the history of the 20th century – and far from the reductive idea of cinematic "glamour" that is so often associated with movie memorabilia. The images and texts describe a territory where private lives and politics, art and terror, famous and marginalized films, and desired and despised objects, all engage in conversation with each other. This picture book in 50 chapters begins with a cinema and ends with a cactus (or vice versa).

With her documentaries and essay films since the late 1970s, Viennese filmmaker Ruth Beckermann has created an exciting and widely recognized body of personal/political cinema. Her work reflects on the relations between history and contemporaneity, on her life as a Jewish woman in postwar Austria and Europe, and on travelling and migration as modes of staying alive - literally as well as artistically. Beckermann's films speak about identity conflicts and the class struggle, about her family history in the Habsburg monarchy (The Paper Bridge) and the war generation as it confronts the crimes of the Werhrmacht (East of War). Most recently, she has turned her sights towards the deep love affair between two poets, Paul Celan und Ingeborg Bachmann, in 1950s Vienna (The Dreamed Ones). This is the first book about Ruth Beckermann's multifaceted oeuvre, with original essays by critics and literary writers, rare illustrations and documents, and an in-depth conversation with the artist. Also included are Beckermann's reflections on her current project, The Case of Kurt Waldheim.

In his films Guy Debord (1931–1994) worked according to the following principle: do nothing you should, do everything you should not. Created between 1952 and 1978, all the films reflect this rule and confirm what he referred to as his “detestable ambition.”Gathered in a single volume for the first time in German, this publication unites the texts of all of Guy Debord’s films in a new translation: from his first film made in affiliation with the Lettrist group led by Isidore Isou, Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952), an alteration of black and white sequences devoid of images; to works that originated in the course of his participation in the Situationist International, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (1959) and Critique de la séparation (1961); to the adaptation of his best known theoretical work, La Société du spectacle (1973), followed by the response to his critics entitled Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu'hostiles, qui ont été jusqu'ici portés sur le film "La Société du spectacle" (1975) and his résumé, intended as an act of closure: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978).Texts and images are true to the French original edition and complemented by a list of sources for the quotes, Debord’s notes on his films, drafts of unrealized film projects, as well as the text of the TV documentary he coauthored, Guy Debord, son art et son temps (1994).

The speculations of popular cinema are never identical to and never independent from political concepts. Serving as indexes to current and historical power relations, mainstream films propose specific ways of living and dying, of lying and speaking the truth, of forming alliances and negotiating conflict – they "make sense." At the same time, they invite us into a realm of the senses where objects and feelings move to a different drumbeat. In film and politics, agency and insight often rear their heads in unexpected places. As Siegfried Kracauer has observed: "Effects can at any time turn into causes."In his books and articles, Austrian critic and theorist Drehli Robik has investigated this contested terrain for more than three decades. The depth and esprit of his approach place him in a tradition which Jean-Pierre Gorin has called "the way of the termite" – a mode of thinking that finds unconventional paths towards "White Elephants" and supposedly minor subjects alike. This volume collects some of Robnik's most significant scholarly essays, contributions to pop music magazines and film journals, and samples from his work as a philosophical "edutainer." It draws the map of a cultural-political battleground where Colonel Landa and Private Ryan, Monsieur Hulot and Dr. Strangelove, Barbara Loden's loner and Jordan Peele's collective of "Us" all have their reasons.