Johannes Hammel

The film "Favoriten" accompanies schoolchildren from a so-called "Brennpunkt"-school in Vienna-Favoriten through the third grade of elementary school, which will determine their future education.

During the preparations for its 100th anniversary, the Chamber of Labor is accompanied and proves to be a unique contact point for the many people fighting for their rights.

Sabaudia in Italy, created by Mussolini’s architects as a model “new fascist city”, was supplied with extensive farm lands converted from marshes. Yet, despite its undeniably “brutal” architecture, creators including Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini subsequently found Sabaudia to be a wonderful, hospitable place – the sign of a genuine, traditional Italy, and its resistance to all modern ideologies. Lotte Schreiber constructs a multi-faceted, documentary view of Sabaudia, inspired by but going beyond Pasolini, portraying it as a paradoxical mixture of social class separation, nostalgia, and everyday whimsy. (Adrian Martin)

It’s not uncommon for a film to have a moving love story at its core. Yet this particular set-up is unusual. The lovers here are Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, both important representatives of post-war German-language poetry. The story of the relationship between the Austrian and the Jew from Czernowitz is told through their nearly 20-year correspondence (1948–1967). Or, more precisely, by a young woman and a young man reading from their letters in a studio in Vienna’s venerable Funkhaus.

Rain on a window pane, a fire truck, a tomcat with innumerable offspring: it is an intentionally unintentional gaze that allows for chance encounters, for stories and memories - leads that Ruth Beckermann follows across Europe and the Mediterranean. Nigerian asylum seekers in Sicily, an Arab musician in Galilee, nationalists drunk on beer in Vienna, the Capitoline Wolf, and three veiled young women trying for minutes to cross a busy road in Alexandria. Threads, cloth and textiles pop up like book marks in a fabric of movement, of traveling or seeking refuge.

Johannes Hammel’s three-part Jour Sombre. He employed home movies shot in the 1950s and ’60s, of trips into the mountains, hikes across a glacier, alpine huts and lakes. We see groups of people spread out across the alpine landscape, in the background the dazzling white of the sun’s bright reflection from a glacier. Binoculars are pointed upward. At the sky, or the sun? Then a bubble appears, filling the picture and virtually swallowing the landscape. There’s a glare, as if a ray of light reflected from the ice were burning directly into the camera lens or our retina. Other bubbles follow, and the entire scene begins to boil. Heinz Ditsch’s soundtrack encourages this unsettling scenario. In the next part a swimming woman is harassed by nicks and scratches covering large areas, and what was originally idyllic becomes fractured and furrowed like dried clods of dirt. The soundtrack provides fitting crackling and scraping.

Rather than focusing on the monuments and representational architecture of the Plaza, Tlatelolco concentrates on the neighboring residential high-rises. Built in the 1960s under the supervision of modernist Mario Pani, Unidad Habitacional Nonoalco-Tlatelolco is the largest apartment complex in Mexico City. Realized at the zenith of Mexico’s economic boom, Pani’s vision of a “vertical city” beyond class distinctions has itself been shaken up on multiple occasions. Schreiber and cameraman Johannes Hammel capture the fading of an urban architectural utopia.

An experimental study about the love between Franz Kafka and his adored Felice based on their correspondence.

An experimental study about the love between Franz Kafka and his adored Felice based on their correspondence.

Nine persons sign up for a self-awareness course at an isolated country estate. Dr. Romero, a charismatic therapist, and his assistants confront the patients with their problems. Cut off from the rest of the world, the participants are increasingly drawn into the therapy's spell.

"Cosmodrome" (= Launch pad for space rockets) is a film about the connection between cinema and cosmos. A revolving globe; the distribution logo of the Universal film studio shows the viewer an act of "initiation" taking place in the cosmos - a key image between cinema architecture and cinematic space.

A few hours in the life of empress Sisi; a summer night at Gödöllö. A game with operetta and melodrama; a grotesque with much colour, music, dancing, and bloodshed.

A short segment of film is played with musical backing at various speeds for a jarring effect.

Darkness and its possession evoke artistic "pre-images": primarily Expressionism and its "after-images". The story is told of a stroll through the (cinematic) night, of absurd and of dead theater.

Haymon Maria Buttinger, a legendary Austrian prop master, singer and actor. A showman in front of the camera and his great dream of being Macbeth, Quasimodo and Jeckyll-Hyde just once. The portrait of a friend.

Based on Samuel R. Delany’s short novel ‘Aye, and Gomorrah...’, where the sci-fi premise of radiation-resistant state-neutered space travellers allows the author to explore androgyny, sexual identity, etc. Hammel uses Delany’s story to create a spookily beautiful world where asexual bodies live in the contradiction between their unarousable loneliness and desire for intimacy and contact.

Based on Samuel R. Delany’s short novel ‘Aye, and Gomorrah...’, where the sci-fi premise of radiation-resistant state-neutered space travellers allows the author to explore androgyny, sexual identity, etc. Hammel uses Delany’s story to create a spookily beautiful world where asexual bodies live in the contradiction between their unarousable loneliness and desire for intimacy and contact.

Based on Samuel R. Delany’s short novel ‘Aye, and Gomorrah...’, where the sci-fi premise of radiation-resistant state-neutered space travellers allows the author to explore androgyny, sexual identity, etc. Hammel uses Delany’s story to create a spookily beautiful world where asexual bodies live in the contradiction between their unarousable loneliness and desire for intimacy and contact.

Air raid bunkers represent the architecturally intact remains of World War II. The film looks into their ideological as well as their material texture and puts them into the context of the urban infrastructure of the nineties.

"Masculinity" is the subject of this film. Harald, the protagonist, fails in his blind attempt to prove his masculinity at Maria's expense. The Stone Age is over. Is it really?

"Studio Schönbrunn" is an ironic play with quotations. Paula Wessely in the Nazi-Wien-Film-production "Heimkehr", Leni Riefenstahl's biography, as well as Nestroy, Mozart, Marx, Frank Sinatra, Jandl. The text is adapted, de-familiarized and de-subjectivized. Consequently, the leading actor shoots the film's author.