Neil Young hails the 2008 Vienna International Film Festival as one of the best ever

TO PARAPRHASE Tommy Lee Jones from No Country For Old Men, the Viennale – which showcased the Coen brothers Oscar-magnet 12 months ago – may not be the best film festival in the world, but if it ain’t, it’ll certainly do until the best one comes along. The event, officially known – but hardly ever referred to – as the Vienna International Film Festival, has taken place each October since 1960 in Austria’s impossibly culture-saturated capital, bringing a couple of hundred movies (plus myriad shorts) to an unusually cine-literate, adventurous, youthful audience: 90,000 admissions every year, give or take.

The Viennale has never – thankfully – been a “red carpet” festival attracting the kind of Hollywood stars and world premieres one associates with Europe’s long-running, paparazzi-haunted “A-List” events at Cannes, Berlin and Venice. Instead, under the idiosyncratic stewardship of maverick, ever-uncompromising cineaste Hans Hurch, it presents – mainly in characterfully-opulent movie-palaces – a careful selection of the most talked-about, critically-esteemed features from each of those glitzy jamborees, plus other select venues on the global festival-circuit.

This year, the haul included the top prize-winners from both Cannes (Laurent Cantet’s The Class) and Venice (Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, more of which anon). But what lifts this particular festival above others is the intelligent attention it pays to cinema’s past, as well as the present and possible futures. There is always an irresistibly generous offering of sidebars dipping judiciously into the first century of movie history – the only problems being that not all the selections are shown with English subtitles, and also the small matter of fitting everything into a single crowded visit.

This year’s subsidiary strands were dedicated to: John Gianvito (a leading-light of the American avant garde, whose 2006 Profit motive and the whispering wind is an instant classic of quiet but ferociously engaged, agit-prop art), Miguel Gomes (only 36, but already regarded as the next big thing from Portugal), Nora Gregor (a long-neglected Teutonic starlet, best known for Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game), Werner Schroeter (a key figure of post-war German cinema, whose many ardent fans included a certain RW Fassbinder); and, in the Viennale’s nod to the relative mainstream, Bob Dylan, via an eclectic sampling of movies tangentially or directly connected with Minnesota’s favourite son. The latter afforded an exceedingly rare chance to catch Jean-Luc Godard’s 1986 subversive anti-televison-movie Rise and Fall of a Little Film Company from a novel by James Hadley Chase on the big screen.

All this was in addition to a pleasingly random grab-bag of two-dozen art-house favourites from the past seven decades – Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve to Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil to Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche and Christian Petzold’s The State I Am In – assembled as an affectionate tribute to long-serving Vienna cinema-manager Franz Schwarz. There was also an evening of slapstick shorts compiled by sometime Godard collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin in honour of recently-deceased film-criticism doyen Manny Farber. This laughathon included 1919’s The Cook, bringing together Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle and a disarmingly young Buster Keaton, the former (who also directed) harvesting just as many laughs as the latter.

Dwarfing all of these sections, meanwhile, both in terms of size and scope, was the programme shown at the Austrian Filmmusem under the heading “Los Angeles – A City On Film”. Every year the Filmmuseum – a magnificent cinematheque run in a discreet corner of a former Habsburg palace by Alexander Horwath – hosts a month-long parallel programme which covers the whole of October, organised by a special guest curator.

This year the honour fell to American director and teacher Thom Andersen, whose Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) is one of the most stimulatingly brilliant cine-essays of the decade: a portrait of California’s sprawling mega-metropolis over the past century as seen through the countless movies shot within its environs. From acknowledged classics such as Chinatown to video-destined obscurities like Dead Homiez, each is revealed as offering invaluable psycho-geographic glimpses of the ever-changing Los Angeles landscape.

Asking Andersen to assemble a season of Los Angeles films was an inspired move. The results allowed Viennale-attendees the privilege of experiencing an array of rarities in glorious 35mm, courtesy of the Filmmuseum’s impeccable projection facilities: Jack Hill’s smash-’em-up B-movie Pit Stop (1969); Irving Lerner’s hitman opus Murder By Contract (1958); Andre De Toth’s hard-bitten noir Crime Wave (1954), plus Andersen’s own pungently atmospheric time-capsule short Olivia’s Place (1966).

My personal highlight of Andersen’s programme was HB Halicki’s sui generis demolition derby from 1974, Gone In 60 Seconds – a berserk low-budget underground classic whose sluggishly exposition-heavy first half suddenly yields to a 40minute climax that constitutes one very long car-chase. Screened in a suitably scuzzy, grindhouse-vintage, Swedish-subtitled print, the picture – emphatically not to be confused with Hollywood’s big-budget remake Gone In Sixty Seconds (2000) – provided a thunderously entertaining night-out-at-the-pictures experience for a sell-out crowd.

Rather more rarefied delights were on offer via the Werner Schroeter retrospective – which the gravely-ill maestro himself graced with a personal appearance, during a tribute evening that featured a suitably uninhibited concert by Fassbinder-muse (and sometime wife) Ingrid Caven. Far too few of the Schroeter films incorporated English subtitling, but those that did included the movie regarded as his chef d’oeuvre, Der Rosenkönig (“The King of Roses”) from 1986. It’s a ripe example of the unapologetic, floridly symbolic, too-much-is-not-enough “art film” which used to crop up regularly late at night in the very early days of

Channel 4, but which so rarely gets funded any more – and whose opulent grandeur, in this specific case, quickly transcends what initially looks like unbearable pretentiousness.

What plot there is involves Anna Rahma (Schroeter’s favourite diva, Magdalena Montezuma), a tormented, mentally-unstable, imperious grande dame who moves to a rambling mansion on the Portuguese coast to grow roses. But this is a mere of pretexts for a series of intense, operatically sensual reveries. This is not for everyone, by any means, but yielding unexpected rewards for the patiently indulgent.

The problem with experiencing a picture such as Der Rosenkönig is that everything afterwards can seem decidedly semi-skimmed. And it’s an inadvertent problem of the Viennale that the archive material is always so reliably strong that it can cast a daunting shadow over the new stuff.

Nevertheless, any film festival worth its salt would be proud to include such fare as New Wave grande dame Agnes Varda’s delightfully playful, shamelessly namedropping cine-autobiography The Beaches of Agnes; Margaret Brown’s piercingly topical study of race-relations in Mobile, Alabama in The Order of Myths; Eugenio Pologvsky’s harrowing, audaciously unadorned chronicle of Mexican child-labour in The Inheritors; and Celina Murga’s deft tale of class conflict among Argentinian youth in the video-shot drama A Week Alone.

Impressive though all of these fiercely independent works were, all were unambiguously dwarfed by a relatively “mainstream” entry that was the sole 10-out-of-10 masterpiece of the 2008 Viennale: Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, accorded the unusual accolade of three screenings at the cavernously atmospheric Gartenbaukino. I saw a total of 34 feature films, old and new, during the course of a week-long stay, and this unassuming saga of a washed-up WWF-style warrior eking out a living in down-at-heel New Jersey was, by some way, the most accomplished of the entire bunch.

It’s not hard to see why the movie won the Golden Lion at Venice in September, nor why Mickey Rourke is already reckoned to have the Best Actor Oscar pretty much in the bag  – potent rival claims of Sean Penn (Milk), Richard Jenkins (The Visitor), Benicio Del Toro (Che) and Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon) notwithstanding. What is surprising is that the contributions from pretty much everyone else involved in the film – director Aronofsky (previously known for visually tricky, smart-alecky enterprises Pi, Requiem For A Dream and The Fountain) first-time scriptwriter Robert D Siegel, and their entire technical team -– should match or, in many cases, exceed Rourke’s superlative work. Gritty, hilarious, moving, thumpingly entertaining and unobtrusively multi-layered, The Wrestler – which also played during last month’s London Film Festival – is released here on January 16. Don’t miss it.