LANGSAMMER SOMMER (SLOW SUMMER)
1976. Austria. Directed by John Cook, in collaboration with Susanne Schett. Screenplay by Cook, Michael Pilz. With Cook, Pilz, Helmut Bozelmann, Eva Grimm. A successful Canadian-born fashion photographer who became “Viennese by choice,” Cook is often cited as one of the most important Austrian filmmakers of the past fifty years—a true auteur who created a deeply personal and vital vision of his adopted city. This screening of Slow Summer, with its sardonic and at times disturbing blurring of fantasy and autobiography, serves as a prelude to a retrospective that will begin this December at Anthology Film Archives of new prints restored by the Austrian Film Museum. Cook takes the uncanny Viennese landscape and his demimonde of artist friends and collaborators as the subject of this fascinating experimental film, which he shot on Super-8 color stock and then printed on black-and-white 35mm. “[Slow Summer] is a strange film,” the critic Olaf Möller observes, “a bit unsettling in its relentlessness, even if one doesn’t know the people in it. The characters bear the same names as the actors, and the line between truth and dare is so thin it’s often just not there; one can never be certain whether the self-loathing and disgust expressed by these people is real, or part of the fiction.” Preserved in 2006 by the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna, and the film’s producer, Michael Pilz. In German; English subtitles. 83 min.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010, 8:00 p.m. , Theater 1, T1
Friday, November 5, 2010, 4:30 p.m. , Theater 1, T1
J’ACCUSE Is Available on DVD for Institutional Sales here.
SLOW SUMMER Is Available on DVD for Institutional Sales here.
