Another year, another Viennale. I’ve never made a secret of the fact that this is the festival that lies closest to my heart: with its enormous palette of films, which brings together the best of the year’s crop of films, without setting them in competition with one another, presented alongside some of the best-curated retrospectives of the circuit, whose quality rivals that of specialized forums (like the ones in Bologna or Pordenone). I come here every fall mainly to catch the titles that I haven’t seen elsewhere, and whenever I have enough time to cover some of the gaps that I have in my knowledge of heritage film (which is, after all, inevitable for a cinephile coming from a country of dying cinemas), I throw all of my energy into the process. Said and done: in the eight days that I have spent here so far, none has passed without me attending at least one screening from the massive series that was dedicated this year to the great, unique, indefatigable Raúl Ruiz (1941 – 2011), whose work I knew much too little of until last week.

Of course, a full retrospective of the works of such a prolific and chameleonic artist – film historians estimate that he directed over 100 films in his lifetime, and more and more keep springing up from his archives, which are under the care of his (artistic, and intimate) partner Valeria Sarmiento (see our 2020 interview with her) – is an almost impossible feat. The one presented at the Viennale and Filmmuseum features almost half his known oeuvre (42 titles). To have a structured framework for exploring such a dense and large body of work is certainly a great privilege – as always, the work of the Filmmuseum’s team is stunning.

Comedies of innocence

I decided to start my dive into Ruiz’s filmography with one of his film maudits, from the latter part of his career, where he aimed for larger audiences: Klimt (2006), since, after all, what town could be better suited to host a screening of this film than Vienna? Of course, it didn’t take too long to realize why this is one of the weaker films of his career. Although abundant in his signature formal hat tricks (like the scene set at the Cafe Central, where artistic manifestos are read aloud while the room dizzyingly spins around the speakers), this quasi-biopic lacks energy – John Malkovich performs in his “serious” mode (the same as in Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky: pathetic, histrionic), while the (ornamental) nude temptresses that surround him with games of sensuality and jealousy leave a bitter taste (even if they do have a concrete relation to Klimt’s biography, and are regarded in a dialectical fashion, that questions their representation within the Sezession movement). On the other hand, the very same Malkovich is simply stunning as the melancholy Lord Numance in Les Âmes Fortes (2001) – a virtuoso, yet simultaneously cryptic adaptation of a historical novel from 1950, which sees an abjectly poor teenager manipulating the kindness and generosity of a noblewoman; now an elderly woman herself, she reflects upon the moral entanglements of her youth.

His superb adaptation of Proust’s last volume of In Search of Lost Time is much more fruitful – Le Temps Retrouvé (1991), crowned by a marvelous performance by Catherine Deneuve (who had to cancel her attendance at the Viennale at the last minute): just look at the ease with which this film glides between the layers of a moribund Marcel’s memory, between the tenets of “usual: historical pieces and psychological realism. What a sublime usage of dolly shots – that potentiate sets with moving furniture pieces, suggesting the ultimate, febrile, subjective visions of a dying man! Ruiz’s late works – qualité infused with visual virtuosity, techniques that doubtlessly derive from the fertile terrain of experimental cinema – are not strikingly different from his early ones, be it the (consistent) handful of features that he shot in Chile before the coup led by Augusto Pinochet or his first few exile films. In fact, there are two main levels to his oeuvre, that end up fusing with one another, in each of his main periods: the Ruiz that is enamored with the history of arts (both fine and literary alike), and the “surrealist” Ruiz – who easily toyed around with genre conventions and, in the words of Adrian Martin (who pens the retrospective’s opening text in the Viennale’s catalog), is much more of an absurdist, and experimentalist that draws upon the tradition of Alfred Jarry, than a “proper” surrealist.

In his hilarious The Wandering Soap Opera (released six years after his death, in 2017, shot in 16mm in Chile at the beginning of the nineties, after the fall of Pinochet’s regime), Ruiz creates a series of sketches based upon various archetypal situations in second-hand telenovelas (a cheating couple is caught red-handed, a plot that unspools in the dead of night, an unexpected encounter between a man and a woman), only to blow them up from the inside with an apparently nonsensical dialogue, heavily reliant on non-sequiturs, but that is essentially (and deeply) political. (One early scene sees a woman telling her lover that, if he wants to touch her knee, he will have to first tell her whether he is “a leftist” or not.) On the other side of the decade, we have Comédie de l’innocence – in which a child no longer recognizes his mother (Isabelle Huppert) and takes on the identity of the dead son of another woman (Jeanne Balibar) – is a very well-balanced mix between absurdist comedy, psychological drama, and B-series horror flicks: all the more so that one of the most important objects in this very playful feature is a mini-DV camera, a chance to create both a film-within-a-film and a figurative gamble with the images’ pixelated textures.

One must also bring Valeria Sarmiento into the discussion – because she is much more than the simple custodian of Ruiz’s oeuvre (or his widow), but also an artist in her full right – who has the very same playful, intensively creative spirit as her partner. I don’t only mean to refer to her work as an editor on most of his films, but also to her endeavors as a director – for example, her ingenious choice to present the film in reverse in the second half of The Tango of the Widower (2020), or the decision to frame certain scenes in The Wandering Soap Opera within television screens (thus creating a dialogue between them, at certain moments). (El Realismo Socialista, shot in 1973, which is the fourth Ruiz feature that was finalized by Sarmiento after his [assing, was presented at the Viennale before my arrival.) The festival hosted the international premiere of her latest documentary, a film as short as it is powerful, that discusses the remnants that were left behind by the trauma of the dictatorship in Chile. Formally speaking, this is not an unfamiliar territory (for the most part, we see talking heads, footage shot within institutions, and fragments from the director’s video diaries). However, the people that Sarmiento gathers in front of her camera to preserve the direct memory of this trauma (as this is a generation that lies on the verge of extinction) reveal an entirely new perspective on the horrifying events of the seventies: as she weaves in the utterly fascinating science of epigenetics into the film, a pioneering discipline that studies how intergenerational trauma and post-memory (which are mainly used in humanistic studies) come to affect the very fabric of human DNA, as the echoes of atrocity (kidnappings, extrajudicial killings, torture, deprivation of liberty) ending up being passed down through the generations.

Beyond nostalgia: the works of Narcisa Hirsch

Beyond the works of Ruiz and Sarmiento, I went down further into the Viennale’s retrospectives, and watched the entirety of the one dedicated to Argentine filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch, whose short films were presented in four programs, presented under the motto No Hay Nostalgia (There is No Nostalgia, the line that concludes her beautiful Rafael, Agosto de 1984, a film conceived as a gift towards an ex-partner, steeped in the melancholy feeling of an ending life chapter). Hirsch’s oeuvre dances along the fine line between experimental cinema and video art: somewhat unequal at times, given the fact that many are recordings of happenings and public interventions, interesting in and of themselves as artistic actions, such as Edgardo, Marabunta, or Manzanas, but not at all spectacular as films. Still, they are so incredibly fruitful when they consider the possibilities of the cinematic medium, touching upon a vast range of thematic areas – the sign of a constant, sustained, perpetually curious creative process.

See, for example, the two diaries she filmed in the Patagonian steppes in 1972, psychedelic head trips that gather spectacular landscapes of Southern Argentina in a dizzying montage; her incredible, horizontally-shot sequence inspired by Mircea Eliade, La Noche Bengali; or this superb documentary in which a handful of women are commenting on a recording of their own faces (Seguro que Bach cerraba la puerta cuando queria trabajar) off-screen, identifying their emotions, their gestures, their changes, their similarities with their ancestors. This latter film is representative of one of the main threads in Hirsch’s cinema: femininity – seen as a process of constant negotiation of both gender roles, and also of image and representation.

In Pink Freud, set to the famous tune of Echoes, we see how a couple’s apartment (in between moments of intimacy that the woman doesn’t quite seem to enjoy), is slowly filled up with an infinite series of miniature plastic babies, which are diligently cared for by the man; whereas Mundial ‘78 (my favorite of them all, by far) opens with the playful indication of shooting women that scream “Goal!”, against the backdrop of Argentina’s first triumph at World Cup, under the leadership of the legendary Mario Kempes. The film’s most fascinating aspect is its main device: a series of intertitles that recall silent cinema, that bear a series of instructions (“Film the front page of a newspaper”, “Film a football game in the streets”) that extends much beyond a simple exercise: both a portrait of the fragile state of Argentina after the military dictatorship, and a process-based film that that toys around with its existence (see its many “false endings”, where we witness its direction, editing, handling and, ultimately, screening).

Quick flight: Schikele, Mann, Snow

I thought I’d “tick off” at least one screening from two of the other retrospectives (unfortunately, I didn’t make it to the ‘national’ ones, dedicated to Chilean and Austrian cinema) – starting with Nicolas Klotz & Elisabeth Perceval (whose work I must admit I’ve seen little of), from which I chose Low Life (2011). A remake of Bresson’s Le Diable Probablement set in the late aughts, in Lyon, where the protagonists’ ennui has a bit to do with the impossibility of love in the modern world (like in the original), but the death of the revolutions of 1968 is replaced here by the sheer brutality of the modern French immigration system. A deeply political film, that pulsates with anger and verve, but that loses much of its traction in its final half-hour. On the other hand, one of this year’s revelations was Bushman (1971), one of the three films directed by David Schkele. A film that is kindred in spirit with Med Hondo’s 1967 masterpiece, Soleil O, Bushman fictionalizes the life experience of a Nigerian man who comes to teach in San Francisco, where he remains stuck because of the civil war in Biafra. A searing, profoundly funny condemnation of the hypocrisy of the late sixties – from hippies who try to hide their racism beneath various empty slogans to the American people of color who seem oblivious to the fact that they’re privileged in comparison to black people who have African passports –, toying with the limits between fiction and documentary, which is ultimately forced by reality itself to choose the latter road: the main actor ends up being incarcerated and deported by the authorities, similar to the trajectory his character was to take in the film’s original script.

Amidst all this (not exactly easy) viewing, I thought it would be a good idea to unwind a bit and try something at the Gartenbaukino – the Viennese grand temple of cinema, which hosts premieres of “big”, “popular” titles –, that is, Ferrari. Or so I thought – because Michael Mann’s new film is anything but a lightweight film. This biopic of patriarch Enzo F. (a grey-haired Adam Driver, speaking in an Italo-English accent a thousand times better than the one in House of Gucci) who is caught at the crossroads – of his failing marriage, his struggling company, his dying race drivers – is not some brute, macho display of testosterone. Rather, it’s a heavily nuanced portrait of a man whose merits and failings are on the same level: one that is enormously high, wrapped in the soft charm of lines that are as playful as they are serious (and this is quite possibly the best-written blockbuster of the year), seconded by an incredible performance of Penélopei Cruz (acting at the same intensity she displays in the films of Almodóvar). Mann painstakingly recreates the artifacts of fifties Italy, an accompanying landscape that covers the ascent of modern sports, sciences, and market economy. The key of the film (or, at least, one of them) lies in a brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-type shot that is nestled during the Mille Miglia race, when the racecars of Ferrari and his competitor, Maserati, approach their pit stop in the center of Rome, surrounded by an enormous mass of onlookers: two enormous, imperial marble lions at the foot of an Italian palazzo gaze, their mouths open wide, at the flight of these incredible machines. The two great miracles of mankind, Mann seems to whisper: Art and Science.

And as with every Viennale so far, there’s one moment I’ll count among the highlights of my film-going life – and this time around, it’s the chance to see what is probably the most famous experimental film of all time on the big screen: Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967). The festival’s choice of presentation was, indeed, a curatorial coup de foudre: joining it with the latest films by Pedro Costa (As Filhas Do Fogo; Costa also directed the edition’s trailer) and Jean-Luc Godard (Film annonce du film qui n’existéra jamais: ‘Drôles de guerres’), which I was extremely happy to rewatch in the cinema (especially since both films gather new, painful meanings, in light of recent atrocities that have happened in the world). Knowing Wavelength, I wasn’t as shell-shocked as I was many years ago, when I first saw the film – how this piece of cinema is both so simple, yet so complex and dialectical in its relationship to what cinema is –, and I allowed myself to sink deep within its hypnotic universe, of each increasingly smaller frame, of each new color that bled onto the reel, of its distorted version of the Beatles’  Strawberry Fields Forever playing over a broken radio set: „But you know, I know when it’s a dream / I think I know, I mean, ah, yes / But it’s all wrong (…) Nothing is real / And nothing to get hung about.”

The Viennale continues for another two days. You’ll find me here, as always; if not, see you again next year – for sure.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.