The Circuit

by Lisa Nesselson
Many festivals revel in late night screenings that last until reveille, but far rarer is the under-exploited idea of showing films at 6:30 in the morning (with coffee and pastries thrown in).  Well over 200 people showed up for the Viennale's crack o' dawn weekday showing of "The U.S. vs John Lennon," which they watched attentively without subtitles before heading off to work.

A 6:30 a.m. showing of "Paranoid Park" was just as successful. 

Although many foreign journalists make Vienna an annual stop (including hardcore film buffs who segue from the Silent Film Fest in Pordenone, Italy), the Viennale is first and foremost an event for local audiences.

This year set new attendance records, with an all-time high tally of 91,700 fest-goers, up from 88,900 visitors in 2006.  One hundred and twenty six screenings out of a total of 321 sold out, for a figure of 79.2 percent capacity.

This would be impressive in almost any context, but the Viennale is very strong on non-traditional documentaries, flat-out experimental work and previously unheralded films from ultra-indie helmers.  The polyglot Viennese don't blink at un-subtitled prints of slangy French films and show a grasp of colloquial English that can only leave the native speaker in awe.  (Frederick Wiseman's riveting 217-minute-long procedural docu "State Legislature" held an audience rapt. And "George A. Romero's Diary of The Dead" had viewers rolling in the aisles.)

In recent years, Vienna has shone a generous spotlight on distaff American legends from the late Fay Wray (who watched herself in Erich von Stroheim's "The Wedding March" on her first late-in-life trip to Austria) to the ever-feisty Lauren Bacall.  This year's guest, Jane Fonda, was enthusiastically welcomed in conjunction with a well-curated retrospective of her film work.

Her compatriots Haskell Wexler, Hal Hartley, Tom Kalin and Todd Haynes were on hand during the fest as were retrospective honorees Nina Menkes and Pascale Ferran.  A space alien arriving during the Viennale could be forgiven for concluding that women make just as many films as men do.

The Austrian Film Archive collaborated with the Viennale on an ambitious sidebar, "The Way of the Termite - The Essay in Cinema 1909 - 2004" curated by bracingly cranky and always enlightening filmmaker and critic Jean-Pierre Gorin.

Gorin was bemused to be in town at the same time as Fonda, who co-starred (with Yves Montand) in "Tout va bien" the Jean-Luc Godard film Gorin co-wrote and co-scored in 1972.

If "Termite..." -- which drew 4,000 paying customers -- isn't a daunting enough title for a film series, consider surprise hit  "Proletarisches Kino in Österreich" ("Proletarian Cinema in Austria"), many of whose offerings sold out.