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Fooling around with film : political visions of Austria - past, present and future

This article takes as its focus two films released at the beginning of the Noughties that use the documentary mode to satirical ends. They can be said to represent two types of ‘fake’ documentary or mock-documentary, in the first case in a film that styles itself with all the codes and conventions of a classic information film (Walter Wippersberg’s Die Wahrheit über Österreich; 2001) and, in the other (Peter Kern’s 1. April 2021 – Haider lebt; 2002), a film whose near-future setting marks it as fiction but which foregrounds the investigative activities of a protagonist setting out to make a ‘documentary’ film about contemporary Austria. Both films, I argue, draw their impetus from the political turn to the right of 1999/2000 and can be read as cultural contributions to the domestic as well as international protest at the inclusion of the populist, extreme right-wing party, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) into Austria’s coalition government of February 2000. Despite the near-cult status of Wippersberg’s earlier mock ethnographic film, Das Fest des Huhnes (1992), and the prolific output of Peter Kern, the material discussed here is under-researched and is subjected here to a nuanced reading that is careful to provide socio-political context. The two examples discussed here toy with the parameters of documentary and raise interesting questions about how the ‘real’ can be represented or intervened in, but their significance derives from more than mere aesthetic playfulness.