14 October 2021

Festival for cineasts 'Viennale' (21 - 31 Oct 2021) pays homage to the curatorial practice of Amos Vogel with a selection of contemporary socially critical films concerning topics like body perfection, or AI and robots

The annual festival Viennale has its origins in the 1960s, in the same time as mass media and the making of opinion became topics in research in Austria. The intellectual approach makes the festival until today to an exceptional meeting place of the entertainment industry. Tickets are available from 16 October at Viennale.at or at the cinemas where Viennale happens this year: Gartenbaukino, Stadtkino im Künstlerhaus, Urania, Metro Kinokulturhaus, and the Österreichisches Filmmuseum (Austrian Film Museum). In the last mentioned, the film screenings of this year's retrospective (calendar) concerning the theoretical approach to curating film programs for expressing findings of social research with the esthetics of film will happen.

The retrospective pays homage to Amos Vogel (born 100 years ago 1921 in Vienna, died 2012 in New York) who had to move in the 1930ies to the US where he pioneered curating film programs by selecting movies for mediating socially critical content. The Austrian Film Museum (where the library of Amos Vogel with his memories of leaving Vienna is located today filmmuseum.at/en/library/amos_vogel_library) introduces the collaboration with Viennale with a short biography with information about his research activities (he was professor of film studies at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania) or his book 'Film as Subversive Art' from the 1970ies.

At filmmuseum.at, also the names of the curators who selected films after Amos Vogel's approach to film "as a form of aesthetic, social and political activism" can be found together with the themes of their explorations such as 'Subversive Bodies' by curator Kim Knowles or 'The Varieties of Subversive Experience' by curator Roger Koza. The curators are present like Kim Knowles at the screening of the film 'Riot Not Diet' viennale.at/en/film/riot-not-diet concerning body perfection or Roger Koza at 'A.I. at war' viennale.at/en/film/ai-war.

Images, from left: Viennale 2021 poster sujet. Concept & realisation: Rainer Demp/Viennale. Right: Film still from 'Riot Not Diet' by filmmaker and queer-feminist activist Julia Fuhr Mann (Germany, 2018). Photo: © Sammlung Österreichisches Filmmuseum.