MoMA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna, with a major collaborative exhibition exploring Vienna as a city both real and mythic in the history of cinema. Presented with additional contributions from the Filmarchiv Austria, and in association with Carnegie Hall’s Vienna: City of Dreams festival, the exhibition focuses on Austrian and German Jewish émigrés—including Max Ophuls, Erich von Stroheim, and Billy Wilder—as they look back on the city they left behind, along with an international array of contemporary filmmakers and artists—including Jem Cohen, VALIE EXPORT, Michael Haneke, Kurt Kren, Stanley Kubrick, and Richard Linklater—whose visions of Vienna reveal the powerful hold the city continues to exert over our collective unconscious. Spanning the late 19th to the early 21st centuries, from historical and romanticized images of the Austro-Hungarian empire to noir-tinged Cold War narratives, and from a breeding ground of anti-Semitism and European Fascism to a present-day center of artistic experimentation and socioeconomic stability, the exhibition features masterworks and rediscoveries of fiction and nonfiction, and a rich selection of newsreels and actualités, avant-garde films, and home movies.
Organized by Alexander Horwath, Director, Austrian Film Museum, Vienna, and Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art. Special thanks to the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere.
The exhibition is supported by Austrian Cultural Forum New York. Electronic subtitles courtesy of Sub-Tu Ltd.
