SHE'S been to Hollywood, she's been to Hanoi - but it was only in October that Jane Fonda, in her 70th year, paid her very first visit to Vienna. The occasion: a tribute-cum-retrospective assembled in the Austrian capital for the 45th 'Viennale' - as the 'Vienna International Film Festival' is universally known. Among the ten Fonda movies on show, perhaps the most appropriate selection was Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? from 1969: a nightmarish recreation of the exploitative 'dance marathons' which sprang up in the USA at the nadir of the early-30s Depression years, endurance tests whose competitors danced until collapsing through injury or exhaustion.
    And Viennale currently finds itself, for the time being at least, something of a "last man standing" - at least in terms of the big European film-festivals which aren't afraid to embrace the experimental, the avant-garde and the resolutely non-commercial. Whereas the continent's 'big three' of Cannes, Berlin and Venice have for decades revelled in glamour and glitz, more serious cinephiles turned their attention to what might be called an 'unholy trinity' of major, well-funded, ambitious festivals favouring a more radical programming slant: Vienna (which started in 1960), Rotterdam (1972) and Turin (1982). For various reasons both Rotterdam and Turin are currently in a period of what could charitably be called 'transition', and it remains to be seen which direction they will take in the next few years. Vienna, however, remains under the firm, quixotic control of Hans Hurch (aptly described by Cahiers du Cinema as the "soul and despot" of the festival), whose ethos is to combine the old and the new, the cutting-edge and the (relatively) mainstream.
   Among the latter category, Hurch included a generous selection of films which had competed in Cannes earlier in the year. The Coen brothers' blackly-comic Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country For Old Men (UK release 18th January) fizzles out in its closing stages and doesn't remotely stand comparison with the Coens' first Lone-Star-State thriller, their 1985 debut Blood Simple. That said, it's emphatically preferable to Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (28th December), a kind of skateboard noir in which we find one of world cinema's most bafflingly unpredictable and wayward talents hit a rock-bottom nadir of smugly self-referential self-indulgence.



   If Van Sant's catastrophe is a must-avoid, a pair of must-sees are the Palme d'Or winner, Cristian Mungiu's gripping Ceausescu-era abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (UK release 11th January), plus the latest from Vienna's very own Ulrich Seidl: the piercingly-topical, characteristically-provocative Import Export (UK release TBC), which proved at least as worthy of the big Cannes prize. Seidl tells two simple stories in tandem - one about a hard-working Ukrainian nurse who travels to Austria in search of employment, the other about a hot-headed Austrian youth with financial and domestic problems of his own - and via their juxtaposition makes a number of strong statements about Europe's current social and economic situation.
   Among the other new (or new-ish) titles in Vienna, there were three stand-outs which, for various reasons, may well struggle to obtain commercial distribution in the UK, but which are very much worth keeping an eye out for: from China, Peng Tao's startlingly unsentimental tale of child-exploitation, Little Moth; Hungarian enfant terrible Fliegauf Benedek's dialogue-free, deliciously gnomic Milky Way, and the latest epic fly-on-the-wall cinema-verite documentary from septuagenarian Frederick Wiseman, the absorbing, 200+-minute State Legislature, which minutely (and topically) examines that much talked-about phenomenon, 'American democracy'.
   The Viennale has always been careful to balance new titles with older works, and the 2007 renewal was no exception. In addition to the Fonda tribute the filmmaker-retrospectives included an overdue reassessment of the brief but groundbreaking career of Stephanie Rothman. A protege of Roger Corman, Rothman's five films from 1970-1974 led to her being hailed as the queen of 'exploitation' movies. The Working Girls (1974) takes an endearingly chirpy look at women's-lib issues, so deftly making serious points in a comic format that it's a matter of real regret that Rothman hasn't directed another film since. Hopefully the Viennale spotlight will rectify what looks like a significant cinematic injustice.
   Whereas Rothman's name has regrettably dropped off the radar over the years, Jean-Pierre Gorin retains a prominent place in recent cinema history thanks mainly to his collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard in the late sixties and early seventies - including Tout va Bien (1972), starring a certain Jane Fonda. Gorin is, however, a major talent in his own right - and he was much in evidence at Viennale where, among other duties, he compiled an exhaustive survey of 'essayistic cinema'. This included two of his own works, 1979's delightful Poto and Cabengo - a documentary about a pair of California twins who may or may not have developed their own private language.
   Gorin, who moved from France to San Diego in the early 1970s, is fascinated by closed American communities, especially ones who develop their own particular modes of communication. And it's this fascination which led him to a group of model-railway enthusiasts, one of the main subjects of his 1986 film Routine Pleasures - an unclassifiable picture which ranges freely and lightly over many topics, but which achieves somehow achieves a rare truth and profundity. There can be few cinematic masterpieces - and Routine Pleasures emphatically deserves that much over-used superlative - which are so unassuming, so jaunty, so consistently hilarious. And, sad to say, so little-known (disgracefully, it's not even currently available on DVD.)
   Was it my highlight of V'07? Perhaps - but casting a glance, the latest from California-based one-man-band minimalist James Benning certainly ran it mighty close. Like Routine Pleasures, casting a glance is all about American landscapes - but in a radically different way. A simulated (but utterly convincing) 'biography' of Robert Smithson's "land-art" sculpture 'Spiral Jetty' at Utah's Great Salt Lake over the last 37 years, Benning's wordless film is as ambitious, eloquent and thought-provoking movie as you'll see all year, a tantalising rumination on the nature of our environment, the role of the artist, and the fruitful intersections of the two.

Neil Young
written for the next issue of Tribune magazine



Jigsaw Lounge's film-by-film coverage of the Viennale can be found HERE