ACFNY SUPPORTED | THE CITY WITHOUT JEWS: A SPECIAL FILM CONCERT
As part of MoMA‘s and the Austrian Film Museum‘s expansive program, Vienna Unveiled: A City in Cinema, two astonishing rediscoveries of prewar Austrian Jewish cinema are presented with new original scores written and performed live with theremin, voice, and Taurus bass pedals by the award-winning, Austrian-born composer Dorit Chrysler. Both films are silent with German intertitles and English translation. Preserved by Filmarchiv Austria.
This event is part of the Austrian Cultural Forum’s series of events within the framework of Carnegie Hall’s Vienna: City of Dreams (carnegiehall.org/vienna) festival.
Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City without Jews)
Austria, 1924, 80 min.
Directed by Hans Karl Breslauer
With Johannes Riemann, Hans Moser
Hugo Bettauer’s disturbingly prophetic 1922 novel about the systematic deportation of Viennese Jews, intended by the author as a satire of anti-Semitism, was transformed into this controversial Expressionist film two years later. With Austria’s turn to fascism in 1934 and its increasing acceptance of the political-economic demands made by Nazi Germany (even before the actual “takeover”), Bettauer’s dystopic vision would soon come to pass: Jews were scapegoated and, from 1938, sent into exile or to their deaths, leaving Vienna to become a cultural backwater. Bettauer was murdered by a former Nazi Party member in 1925.
Sami Kratzt Sich (Sammy Scratches Himself)
Austria, 1919, 28 min.
Directed by Leo Stoll
With Josef Fleischmann, Heinrich Burg, Alexander Trebitsch, Grete Heid
This is an indelible artifact of the Budapest Orpheum Society, a popular and often scandalous Jewish-bohemian cabaret group that thrived in Vienna from 1889 to 1919 and produced at least two comic geniuses: actor Hans Moser and songwriter Armin Berg. Led by Josef Fleischmann in the role of “Sammy Storklegs,” members of the group perform a working-class farce about two dentist’s daughters, a Lonely Hearts ad, and two male friendly rivals roving through Vienna in search of a bride. Approx.
>> More information: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/film_screenings/20106
ABOUT THE SERIES
This event is part of the Austrian Cultural Forum’s Vienna Complex Festival 2014. The ACFNY is partnering with New York’s Carnegie Hall to present the large-scale Vienna: City of Dreams festival in Spring 2014. The Austrian Cultural Forum opens the mind and senses to Vienna today. Building upon the vast artistic, intellectual, and cultural legacies of Vienna in 1900, the ACFNY explores the vibrant creative fabric of the ‘city of dreams’ in the 21st century with a festival of contemporary music, a symposium, a major visual art exhibition titled Vienna Complex, and this expansive film series at MoMA.
>> More information: acfny.org/viennacomplex
VENUE
The Museum of Modern Art
Theater 2 (The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2)
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY NY 10019
For tickets please visit: www.moma.org