Themes
Besides affairs from the social life of the period of the monarchy, Wiener Filme also occasionally deal with more remote history, generally in the form of biographies of famous people, predominantly musicians and composers.
As a genre the Wiener Film is almost invariably light entertainment, but one or two exceptional films exploit the possibilities of a more intensive engagement with social or political issues. The effort to do so was seldom made, but the results are all the more noteworthy for their rarity and impact.
An example is … nur ein Komödiant (1935) by the German director Erich Engel. The anti-authoritarian plot, clearly directed against fascism, somehow managed to make it past not only the Austrian but also the German film censors, presumably because of the film's setting in the Rococo period.
Werner Hochbaum, another German director who, like Engel, had taken refuge in Austria, made in 1935 the exceptional film Vorstadtvarieté, striking for a work of this genre in its contemporary political relevance. Set shortly before World War I, this film deals powerfully with a number of Austrian and Prussian characters whose assumptions about life are disrupted by a romantic drama.
Also in 1935, Walter Reisch produced Episode, another outstanding example of a high-quality Wiener Film with added significance. The film is distinguished by its use of the atmosphere of the economic crisis in Vienna in 1922, which is not only evoked but, especially through the acting of Paula Wessely as a desperately impoverished student of commercial art, elevated into a moving psychological portrayal of Viennese double standards and hypocrisy. The film was also noteworthy as being the only Austrian film involving Jews in its production which after the takeover of the National Socialists in Germany succeeded in obtaining exceptional consent from the Reichsfilmkammer to be shown in the Third Reich.
Other highlights of the genre include Paul Fejos' masterpiece, Sonnenstrahl (1933) in the style of Poetic realism, and several of Willi Forst's films, among them the hugely successful Maskerade of 1934/35.
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Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)