Kino Wien Film

Like with novels about bookstores there is an inherent nostalgia to the genre of films about cinemas. Be it in the case of Germany with 66 Kinos, Romania with Cinema, Mon Amour or now Austria or more specifically Vienna with Kino Wien Film by Paul Rosdy, the filmmakers try to avoid nostalgia in order to focus on the people who keep the flame of cinema alive. In Rosdy’s case the death of cinema comes into play only once when the commercial director of a vertically integrated cinema chain, in a typical one-sided argument talks about relative numbers and how many people more are going to cinemas today than yesterday. As the film unfolds, a history of Viennese Cinemas is told from its beginnings to the present. Rosdy doesn’t care about programming, instead he is interested in the people that made and make cinema a social place. Architects, technicians, projectionists and cinema operators like Herbert Dörfler, Horst Raimann or Peter Kubelka talk about their visions of cinema. The film uses found footage to compare the past and the present and it doesn’t shy away from talking about the cinema during the Nazi era when a huge image of Hitler sat enthroned on top of the Urania. (Viennale)