The Ghosts of Vienna | Viennale 2025

Viennale 2025 – The best occasion for an overview of one year of cinema

Orson Welles’ kick-off

Vienna, October 2025: In the charming hall of the historical theatre of Metro, there is a shelf holding plenty of vinyl records, whose film music hits show up as flowers in the garden of cinema memory. I am mesmerized by Orson Welles’ round face, and by the indelible impressions of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). Its Vienna, devastated yet excited by the cynical winds of spy stories, works as a memento today, while the plumbeous clouds of a not-so-cold world war between democracy and authoritarianism encircle the international city and its polished patina of nostalgic tourism and cultural enjoyment. Is The Third Man a sort of cinematographic genius loci of Vienna? I will try to use inspirations from this film and its ghosts in order to find thematic connections between the films of the Viennale 2025. An almost impossible task, insofar as – once again – the Vienna festival is able to assemble almost all of the best arthouse productions of the year. For me, it will be the occasion to sketch one possible overview of one year of arthouse cinema – with links to further discussions about said films on the Filmexplorer websites.

Of temporal entanglement – historical lessons, a-historical learning

What should we learn today from Orson Welles’ monologue about what we should learn from the pitiless lesson of History? A slap in the face is the lesson we learn from Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’ Nova ’78: careful restauration of the archive footage covering William Burrough-and-friends’ Convention in the late Seventies conveys a galvanizing lust for experiments that awakens us from the current torpor of political correctness (more on the film here). A bitter lesson from the past is Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza, where the sheer exhibition of a raw found footage allows us to see the current catastrophe in Palestine as the coherent continuation of a perverse line of ethnic hatred (read the interview with Kamal Aljafari’s here).

Digna Sinke, Hemelseutel

Another aspect of cinematic temporal entanglements is the organic integration of traditions and rural wisdom into the modern life, as presented by Maureen Fazendeiro’s As estações (more on the film here) and Trương Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux’ Hair, Paper, Water… (more on the film here). James Benning’s last meditation on the history of the United States of America in little boy also organically integrates the “then” into the “now”, through a collection of songs and broadcasted speeches that punctuate the personal and collective history of a country that copes with its racial, social, political, and climatic issues. In this way, the film embraces and resumes one life, Benning’s life, in the form of an iceberg whose points are common experiences that we can appropriate. A similar invitation to share an autobiographical line is Digna Sinke’s Hemelseutel, this time in the intriguing form of a (fictional) documentation of the making of a feature film. She can express herself only by putting herself at a distance, controlling said distance, yet simultaneously also showing this control. As viewers, we are constantly on the inside and outside of both the fictional and the documentary stories she tells. The illusive quality of photographic and cinematic images is deconstructed through the exploration of the process of image-making, and this intellectual tour de force seems to be necessary in order to experience the true objective of Digna Sinke’s art. That is her autobiographical core: giving an expression to the passing of time.

Sammy Baloki, L'arbre de l'authenticité

When Kahlil Joseph met historian Saidiya Hartman and poet Fred Moten at Duke University, discussing postcolonial issues, he saw the two poles – historical and a-historical, respectively – between which he developed his film project BLKNWS, a highly edited collage of relevant facts concerning blackness. After several installative versions, the movie theatre version, BLKNWS – Terms and Conditions, now allows us to better focus on the nuances and, interestingly, on the ambivalence that some images convey between neo-colonial, post-colonial, and de-colonial meanings. On one side, we learn from history; on the other, we have to recognise the a-historical truth of its constantly re-emerging invariants: exploitation, segregation, but also the possibility of a transformative experience, of another way of thinking. While Joseph’s work offers us a basin of possible reflections, with a focus on the perspective of North-American blackness and its puzzled relationship to real Africa (more on the film here), Sammy Baloji’s L’arbre de l’authenticité proposes three African perspectives through clearly distinct stories that interrogate the Congo-Belgian colonial relationship. While the first two stories document the potentiality of agrarian development through two historical figures that bear witness to the complexity of a mixed culture, a culture between science and tradition, the third one openly transcends the human perspective and constitutes a fierce criticism of the idea of emancipation itself. In this way, the historically informative core of the film is surpassed by an a-historical factuality, which is anticipated through the poetic images and soundtrack of the entire film.

Intermezzo – Getting lost, falling, rising again

If Orson Welles is the paradigmatic figure of the falling hero (or, in The Third Man, the already fallen hero), he would find in the protagonist of Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind a posthumous companion. Even if the film starts as no more than a refined and amused genre homage – and thus, while growing through its dramatic crescendo, we obtain some distance from the film for the always less credible clumsiness of the protagonist, JB Mooney (Josh O’Connor) – The Mastermind fully blossoms in its last part. Here, JB Mooney clearly places himself into a half-real, half-abstract situation as a fallen hero, incapable of fitting into the American society and its standards. More than just for its social criticism – heavily actual in our hyper-moralist times – the film is convincing, thanks to the existential heights it discretely but effectively achieves, somehow recalling Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) or even Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (1968).

Christopher Petit & Emma Matthews, D is for Distance

Characters that get lost, fall, and then rise again: this is a thread that can gather together some quite different films (re)presented at the Viennale, and I will refer to Filmexplorer’s discussions of Masha Chernaya’s The Shards, Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, Julian Radlmeier’s Sehnsucht in Sangerhausen, Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers, or Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf. For this theme of getting lost, falling, and then rising again, I would like to mention Christopher Petit & Emma Matthews’ touching D is for Distance. The film focuses on the filmmakers’ son coping with epilepsy, and the whole family’s struggle to contain the devastating effects of the disease. A struggle that will reveal itself to be both personal and political. While highly informative, and consequently fulfilling, a terrible lack both in the societal perception of the problem and in the attention of some health systems, the film makes its criticism effective by adopting an artistic language. Thanks to an amazing musical track and an energetic, nervous editing, D is for Distance is able to sublimate the problem itself – and probably also the burden of the parents-filmmakers that, in creating the film, would risk facing a mirroring effect. That is, to be confronted with an eventually uncomfortable self-portrait.

Of ghosts and dreams – beyond the castration of humanity

In The Third Man, Harry Lime is dead, haunts the story as a ghost, then finally reappears as a real person. The ambiguity between fiction and reality that Orson Welles’ character embodies denotes the malicious territory of scheming. On the contrary, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost reverses the meaning of ghosts’ ambiguity for good, and “uses” them as instruments for a fantastic revenge story against social injustice and repressive authoritarianism. Their fierce upheaval, tinted with tones the Marxist clash of classes, is not immune to a fundamental fragility: their being dependent of the fact that real persons remember them. For this reason, dreams and nightmares become essential to their fight, and memory becomes the last resource for political hope (more on the film here). If this Thai film moves from and develops Apichatpong’s cinematic trope, then Chen Deming’s Always moves from and develops the ruralist tradition of Chinese documentary. The portrait of a talented boy living in a remote town of Hunan, Gong Youbin, has the prospect of an emancipation tale, one which relies upon his sensitivity to poetry – something that seems destined to evaporate in the hard conditions of a poor family of farmers. In form and content, the meditative film is nourished by the poems of Gong and his classmates, hinting at an organic idyll with nature which we can consider as both a nostalgic, ephemeral dream or a constructive utopia in contemporary China (more on the film here).

Bi Gan, Resurrection

Nostalgia and utopia conflate in Bi Gan’s grand cinematic work, Resurrection. His third feature is an ambitious ode to cinema in five chapters that resume one century of film history, all seen from the eyes of cinema itself! The heavy symbolism of the first chapter reveals itself to be just a question of filmic style – here mimicking Meliès’ one – which changes according to the epoch in the successive chapters. Be it through expressionist, existentialist, or realist lens, by way of the history of cinema Bi Gan also tells the history of China, from the peculiar but astonishingly appropriate perspective of dreaming. Cinematic dreaming becomes at the same time the realm of sensual enjoyment and non-material values, something anarchic within a world obsessed by the maintenance of power. Cinema is destined to be an outlaw, and as such it is destined to die, and to resurrect in our dreams (more on the film here).

Three films on ghosts and dreams, three films that thematize or presuppose a castration of humanity – and humanities – against which a rebellion finds place outside of our real world. Two echoes of this quite dark vision did I find in the German feminist saga In die Sonne schauen by Mascha Schilinski (more on the film here), and in Rhayne Vermette’s Levers. In this last film from Canada, darkness is literally suffocating an apparently apocalyptic society whose feeling of uncertainty expands to ourselves as viewers. Our understanding is constantly titillated and frustrated, making us dive into one atmosphere of anxiety, thin hope, imminence of catastrophe. A purely oneiric journey in purely emotional matter.

For a more constructive echo of the utopic aspects of ghosts and dreams, I will refer to Ben Rivers’ Mare’s Nest, and its vision of a new generation of children in an organic balance with their more-than-human companions (more on the film here). We can also go deeper in discovering this theme of the more-than-human through Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti’s last work Bestiari, erbari, lapidari, a highly critical assessment of how humans tend to reduce and manipulate nature, but also of how they could be inspired by it (more on the film here). (To the Italian duo the Viennale has dedicated a retrospective on their films, of which Guerra e pace and Spira mirabilis has been discussed on Filmexplorer, respectively with a review and interview).