FILM SCREENING | ALPINE DESIRE FILM SERIES | SHORT FILMS | THE RAPTURE OF THE ALPS

Siegfried A Fruhauf: Höhenrausch (Mountain Trip), (A 1999, 4mins)
Elke Groen: NightStill (A 2008, 9mins)
Lothar Ruebelt: Mit dem Motorrad über den Wolken (A Motorcycle Trip among the Clouds), (A 1926, 56mins, colorized, English subtitles )
Live piano: Elaine Brennan

In cooperation with the Austrian Film Museum and in conjunction with our exhibition Alpine Desire, on view through May 8, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York presents an alpine-themed film series featuring restored gems from the silent movie era as well as rarely seen contemporary films. The series is curated by Michael Loebenstein.

This program presents two contemporary Austrian experimental shorts and a recently rediscovered silent travelogue. What the films have in common is an emphasis on the Alps as a sublime ‘place of yearning,’ as well as a fascination with the potential of cinema to playfully unlock their grandeur. Siegfried Fruhauf’s celebrated short Höhenrausch is a cinematic tour de force constructed with hundreds of Austrian postcards, ironically reflecting on the commercialization of nature.  Elke Groen’s NightStill is a filmic survey of the Austrian Dachstein region, shot with a clockwork-driven film camera over two winters. The time-lapse photography is as awe-inspiring as it is uncanny – an alien landscape showered by stars and buried in snow.

A Motorcycle Trip among the Clouds is a travel documentary shot and directed by Austrian news and sports photographer Lothar Ruebelt. Shot on location in the Dolomites (where Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands was situated) Ruebelt’s film is a noteworthy example of the ‘frenzy for the mountains,’ which gripped Europe in the 1920s and 1930s and sparked off organized mountain tours, the construction of motorways across the Alps as well as the ‘Bergfilm’ (mountain film) genre. The copy presented is the shorter, albeit colorized, version of this rare film preserved by the Austrian Film Museum.

Vienna-based Irish musician Elaine Brennan will be accompanying the films on piano. She has been engaged by numerous universities, conservatories, orchestras, broadcasters, choirs, chamber groups, soloists, and ensembles, and has accompanied numerous silent films on piano, most recently the major works of directors DW Griffith, Howard Hawks, and Ozu Yasujiro.

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