Wiener Film (German; plural: Wiener Filme; literally, "Viennese film") is an Austrian film genre, consisting of a combination of comedy, romance and melodrama in a historical setting, mostly, and typically, the Vienna of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Wiener Film genre was in production between the 1920s and the 1950s, with the 1930s as its high period.
These films are always set in the past, and achieve a high emotional impact by their oscillation between extreme emotional states, between hope and suffering, for example, or pleasure and loss. Most of them are set in the Vienna of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when as the capital of the multiracial monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire it had its greatest social and cultural significance. The protagonists belong to a variety of social classes, which adds to the interest of the relationships between them. The concepts of honour and morality of the period are often of great significance in the development of the plots. The Wiener Film is almost always happy, life-affirming and relaxed. Music and song feature prominently, either in the form of orchestral and musical scenes or as interpolated songs by the characters. Humour often arises from misunderstandings, mistaken identity, misadventures and the resultant efforts to restore order, with often farcical consequences.
Dramaturgically the Wiener Film generally contains several principal characters and several more subsidiary characters, all of whom recur frequently throughout the film as the action develops. They do not always all know each other, but are nevertheless connected by the plots and sub-plots running in parallel. The action mostly centres on love affairs great and small, often with elements of the comedy of mistaken identity. The films are generally unchallenging in terms of the contemporary socio-political issues and environment (for some rare exceptions see below).
The first films that can be classed as Wiener Filme were created in the 1920s, in the days of the silent film. The genre reached its full potential however with sound film, when the specifically Viennese dialect (see below), verbal dexterity and the characteristically Viennese acid wit ( Wiener Schmäh ) were able to come into their own and made the genre popular not only in Austria but also in Germany. Willi Forst's production Leise flehen meine Lieder , a biography of Franz Schubert, was so successful that an English-language version was made, under the title Unfinished Symphony . Willi Forst is one of the most significant directors of Wiener Film, and made what is generally reckoned to be the best of the genre, the 1935 film Maskerade .
The success of Wiener Film inspired Berlin to imitate the genre, substituting the Prussian court for that of the Habsburg monarchy and moving the setting from Vienna to Berlin. These films were admittedly also very popular in Germany, but the departure from the milieu of Vienna with its people and characteristic speech resulted in the loss of the distinctive atmosphere of the Austrian originals. A particularly good example is the 1931 UFA operetta Der Kongress tanzt by Erik Charell. On the other hand Max Ophüls demonstrated that Wiener Filme could also be made outside Vienna with his production Liebelei of 1933, in which he displays classic Viennese subject matter, although the film was produced in Berlin, with Willy Eichberger and Magda Schneider as the leads. Ophüls very carefully evoked the atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Vienna, while not neglecting to throw into sharp relief the hollow concepts of honour of that period.
During the time of the National Socialist government the popularity of the Wiener Film genre was assured: in almost every way it exactly met the National Socialist requirement for entertaining escapist cinema that distracted attention from reality to a dream world. The Wiener Film thus experienced a lengthening of its heyday, a sort of Late Baroque. Between 1938 and 1945 a few of these films were made with an anti-Semitic, anti-monarchist and anti-democratic undertone, for example E. W. Emo's Wien 1910 . Most Wiener Filme however remained, as previously, unpolitical. In a few productions, notably Willi Forst's masterpiece Wiener Blut , there were even some sly digs at National Socialism.
After the end of National Socialism and of World War II many efforts were made to continue the Wiener Film with all its characteristic features. But the best were no more than mediocre, and the majority were simply bad copies of previous successes. The danger of exhausting the possibilities of what was in any case a very finite genre had been recognised by "Dr Volkmar Iro" as early as 1936: "the potential of Austrian film is nowhere near exhausted by the genuine Austrian milieu alone, and it would pose a certain danger for the continued development of the Austrian film industry if the artistic task of the Austrian film were to be regarded as the working over of nothing but Austrian film themes or the Austrian environment. For, as already mentioned, it is not possible with impunity continually to plunder a subject which is in any case limited." [1]
The Viennese dialect was perhaps the strongest asset of the Wiener Film. The film critic Frieda Grafe once described it as "German made fluid, which makes the listener realise that speech is a matrix of tone which can bring forth meaning simply by the impression of its sound long before it becomes communication in the strict sense". [2] The dialect's many possibilities of expression, the precision, rapidity and fluid formulation of speech come close to the idiosyncratic verbal wit of American screwball comedy.
Besides affairs from the social life of the period of the monarchy, Wiener Filme also occasionally dealt with more remote history, generally in the form of biographies of famous people, predominantly musicians and composers. Only one or two exceptional films exploit the possibilities of a more intensive engagement with social or political issues. The effort to do so was seldom made, but the results are all the more noteworthy for their rarity and impact. An example is … nur ein Komödiant (1935) by the German director Erich Engel. The anti-authoritarian plot, clearly directed against fascism, somehow managed to make it past not only the Austrian but also the German film censors, presumably because of the film's setting in the Rococo period. Werner Hochbaum, another German director who, like Engel, had taken refuge in Austria, made Vorstadtvarieté in 1935. Set shortly before World War I, this film deals powerfully with a number of Austrian and Prussian characters whose assumptions about life are disrupted by a romantic drama.
Also in 1935, Walter Reisch produced Episode , another outstanding example of a high-quality Wiener Film with added significance. The film is distinguished in that it is set against the economic crisis of 1922 in Vienna, which is not only evoked but, especially through the acting of Paula Wessely as a desperately impoverished student of commercial art, elevated into a moving psychological portrayal of Viennese double standards and hypocrisy. The film was also noteworthy as being the only Austrian film involving Jews in its production which after the takeover of the National Socialists in Germany succeeded in obtaining exceptional consent from the Reichsfilmkammer to be shown in the Third Reich.
Other highlights of the genre include Paul Fejos' masterpiece, Sonnenstrahl (1933) in the style of Poetic realism, and several of Willi Forst's films, among them the hugely successful Maskerade of 1934/35.
Some of the best-known stars of the Wiener Filme were Paula Wessely, Attila Hörbiger, Paul Hörbiger, Rudolf Carl, Fritz Imhoff, Leo Slezak, Magda Schneider and Willi Forst himself, who was not only an important director but also an actor. German filmstars also often put in an appearance. The best-known comics in the genre were the very different Hans Moser and Szöke Sakall, and in early sound films Richard Romanowsky.
The most popular composers were Willy Schmidt-Gentner and Robert Stolz.
Juliane "Liane" Haid was an Austrian actress and singer. She has often been referred to as Austria's first movie star.
Paula Anna Maria Wessely was an Austrian theatre and film actress. Die Wessely, as she was affectionately called by her admirers and fans, was Austria's foremost popular postwar actress.
Bruno Bernhard Granichstaedten was an Austrian composer and librettist. He composed sixteen operettas and music for various films. He contributed the song "Zuschau'n kann i net" to the musical play The White Horse Inn. He emigrated from Austria, ending up in the United States of America in 1940, where he was only able to earn his living by playing the piano at night clubs.
Cinema of Austria refers to the film industry based in Austria. Austria has had an active cinema industry since the early 20th century when it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that has continued to the present day. Producer Sascha Kolowrat-Krakowsky, producer-director-writer Luise Kolm and the Austro-Hungarian directors Michael Curtiz and Alexander Korda were among the pioneers of early Austrian cinema. Several Austrian directors pursued careers in Weimar Germany and later in the United States, among them Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, Josef von Sternberg, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, and Otto Preminger.
Sascha-Film, in full Sascha-Filmindustrie AG and from 1933 Tobis-Sascha-Filmindustrie AG, was the largest Austrian film production company of the silent film and early sound film period.
Wien-Film GmbH was a large Austrian film company, which in 1938 succeeded the Tobis-Sascha-Filmindustrie AG and lasted until 1985. Until 1945 the business was owned by the Cautio Trust Company, a subsidiary of the German Reichsfilmkammer, and was responsible for almost the entire production of films in the territory of the Ostmark, as Austria was called at that time.
Willi Forst, born Wilhelm Anton Frohs was an Austrian actor, screenwriter, film director, film producer and singer. As a debonair actor he was a darling of the German-speaking film audiences, as a director, one of the most significant makers of the Viennese period musical melodramas and comedies of the 1930s known as Wiener Filme. From the mid-1930s he also recorded many records, largely of sentimental Viennese songs, for the Odeon Records label owned by Carl Lindström AG.
Julius von Borsody was an Austrian film architect and one of the most employed set designers in the Austrian and German cinemas of the late silent and early sound film periods. His younger brother, Eduard von Borsody, was a film director in Austria and Germany. He is also the great-uncle of German actress Suzanne von Borsody.
Karl Hartl was an Austrian film director.
Maskerade, is an Austrian operetta film, and a classic of German language cinema. The exceptional script of this, a great example of the genre of the Wiener Film, was by Walter Reisch and Willi Forst, who also directed. The German premiere was held in Berlin on 21 August 1934, the Austrian premiere in Vienna not until 26 September of the same year.
Willy Schmidt-Gentner was one of the most successful German composers of film music in the history of German-language cinema. He moved to Vienna in 1933. At his most productive, he scored up to 10 films a year, including numerous classics and masterpieces of the German and Austrian cinema.
... nur ein Komödiant is the title of an Austrian film of 1935. The director was Erich Engel, temporarily in Vienna as a political emigrant from Germany, who with this film made a statement against fascism and authoritarian government. That it passed the strict censors not only of the Third Reich but of Austria can only have been because all political references were veiled by their setting in a royal court of the 18th century.
Ernst Marischka was an Austrian screenwriter and film director. He wrote for more than 90 films between 1913 and 1962. He also directed 29 films between 1915 and 1962. He wrote and directed the Sissi trilogy - Sissi (1955), Sissi – The Young Empress (1956) and Sissi – Fateful Years of an Empress (1957). The films were based on the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. He was the brother of Hubert Marischka. He was named for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1946, for A Song to Remember (1945).
Paul Hörbiger was an Austrian theatre and film actor.
Operetta films are a genre of musical films associated with, but not exclusive to, German language cinema. The genre began in the late 1920s, but its roots stretch back into the tradition of nineteenth century Viennese operettas.
Suburban Cabaret is a 1935 Austrian musical drama film directed by Werner Hochbaum and starring Mathias Wieman, Luise Ullrich and Oskar Sima. It was shot at the Sievering Studios in Vienna. The film's sets were designed by the art director Alfred Kunz. It is based on the play Der Gemeine by Felix Salten.
Viennese Girls is a 1945 historical musical film directed by Willi Forst and starring Forst, Anton Edthofer and Judith Holzmeister. The film was made by Wien-Film, a Vienna-based company set up after Austria had been incorporated into Greater Germany following the 1938 Anschluss. It was the third film in Forst's "Viennese Trilogy" which also included Operetta (1940) and Vienna Blood (1942). The film was finished in 1945, during the closing days of the Second World War. This led to severe delays in its release, which eventually took place in 1949 in two separate versions. One was released by the Soviet-backed Sovexport in the Eastern Bloc and the other by Forst.
Operetta is a 1940 German musical film directed by Willi Forst and starring Forst, Maria Holst and Dora Komar. The film was made by Wien-Film, a Vienna-based company set up after Austria had been incorporated into Greater Germany following the 1938 Anschluss. It is the first film in director Willi Forst's "Viennese Trilogy" followed by Vienna Blood (1942) and Viennese Girls (1945). The film portrays the life of Franz Jauner (1832–1900), a leading musical figure in the city. It is both an operetta film and a Wiener Film.
Hertha ('Hati') Natzler (1911–1985) was a stage and film actress in Austria active from 1928 until 1936.
Dorothea Anna Chlotilde Komarek was an Austrian dancer, actress and operatic soprano.