 Michael Cowan (McGill University) Die Entdeckung Wiens am Nordpol (Peter Eng, 1923) Karin Fest (Austrian Film Museum) Ein Film vom Wäschewaschen [A Film on Doing One’s Laundry] (Rudi Mayer, 1933) Michael Loebenstein (Boltzmann Institute for History and Society) Wien 1963 (1963) Since publishing this caption for the image from Die Entdeckung Wiens am Nordpol the team's researchers have established that the film was not made by Ladislaus Tuszynski, but by Peter Eng. -------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Loebenstein chairs this session, which includes the screening of three films about Vienna, all of which are part of research project called Film.Stadt.Wien (Film.The City.Vienna). Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society launched the Film.Stadt.Wien project in 2009 as a transdisciplinary exploration of Vienna as a cinematic city. Using a variety of moving image content from the collection of the Austrian Film Museum, the two-year project aims to decipher the historical and cultural forces responsible for the collective understanding of Vienna across multiple fields.  The Österreichische Filmmuseum website offers this more extensive abstract: http://filmmuseum.at/jart/prj3/filmmuseum/main.jart?rel=en&content-id=1216730387924&reserve-mode=active A project of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society (Vienna), in co-operation with D&S (Gustav Deutsch and
Hanna Schimek) and the Austrian Film Museum. This project is funded by the WWTF (Vienna Science and Technology Fund). www.wwtf.at
The
project (project start: April 2009, duration: two years) will explore
cinematic representations of Vienna - documentaries, newsreels,
experimental films - alongside the question of how to define the "City"
as an epistomological category. Based on rare materials from the
collection of the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna's principal
cinematheque, film archive and research institute, the project will
develop potentials of inter-textuality and enrich the study of the
Cinematic City as a site of cultural memory and as a resource for the
study of micro-histories. As a transversal project, it intertwines
cultural sciences (urban studies, film studies and analysis) with the
practices of conceptual art.
Our
project, FILM.STADT.WIEN, has two fundamental goals: to investigate and
explore the possibilities of an interface between cultural theory and
art production, and to advance our understanding of the city-on-film as
a 'living document' of social, cultural and political processes by
employing the innovative potentials of this newly developed interface
for the creation of emergent scientific knowledge. In order to
demonstrate how the City is shaped by film we plan to create a 'map' of
Cinematic Vienna. A product of cooperation between researchers and
artists, this map is meant to demonstrate models of transdisciplinarity
deriving from such fields as cultural hermeneutics, semiotics and
iconography.
Furthermore,
principles of conceptual art - making research an integral part of the
'work', the taxonomical structuring of bodies of knowledge and
artefacts, the spatial notation of temporal processes - will inspire
scientific approaches and premises. FILM.STADT.WIEN seeks to mold
primary filmic material on Vienna together with theoretical and
historical discourses on the city and cinema in order to produce an
object that itself allows for repeated and multi-leveled exploration.
As a prototype, this map will serve both as a visual guide to the
cultural and intellectual heritage of the City of Vienna and as an
innovative model of transforming research and theoretical production in
urban history and film studies |
