Children of Vienna
While the Austrian capital is famous for its national opera house, imperial Hofburg palace and Schönbrunn Palace, it also earns a certain notoriety in the hearts of film buffs thanks to the artists it gives birth to. Fritz Lang, the great master of Austrian cinema, director of Metropolis (1927) and M, le maudit (1931), among others; Peter Kubelka, director and co-founder of the Österreichisches Filmmuseum; Wilti Forst, creator of Bel Ami (1939); actors Erich Von Stroheim and Fritz Korner; and director Josef Von Sternberg all had one thing in common, apart from their immense talent, they were all born in beautiful Vienna. In the 1950s, another child of Vienna, Romy Schneider, played the famous Empress Sissi in Ernst Marischka's film series of the same name (1955). This series is part of the Heimatfilm genre (German country films, mostly shot in Germany, Switzerland and Austria), always characterized by a picturesque countryside and its singular inhabitants. Since the late 1980s, Michael Haneke, director of the famous Benny's Video (1992), Funny Games (1997), La Pianiste (2000) and, more recently, Happy End (2017), has been an obvious choice. An Austrian favorite at the world's biggest film festivals, including Cannes, he has won numerous awards throughout his career, including the Palme d'Or in 2009 for Le Ruban blanc and 2012 for Amour. Haneke also launched a line of Austrian directors such as Ulrich Seidl, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Stephan Ruzowitzky and Florian Flickere, who expressed themselves in both documentary and dark fiction. Most of the members of this new generation of filmmakers trained at the Wiener Filmakademie, the Vienna film school renowned for its avant-garde approach.
Vienna at the cinema
The city is also at the heart of many successful cinematic works, starting with Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), starring Orson Welles, in which the viewer wanders through Vienna's sewers, Istvan Szabo's Colonel Redl (1985), which offers a more contemporary view of the city's walls, and Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995). In 2011, the Sigmund Freud Museum was featured in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method. More recently, Vienna was featured in the fifth installment of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015), as well as in Francis Lawrence's Red Sparrow (2018), in which Michaelerplatz is featured. Simon Curtis's 2015 film Woman in Gold(La Femme au tableau), about Maria Altmann (1916-2018) and her fight against the Austrian government to recover works by Klimt stolen from her family by the Nazis. In Vienna, the Viennale festival takes place every year at the Gartenbaukino cinema, featuring a selection of films from international independent cinema of all genres. There's also a film museum on the first floor of theAlbertina.
