"Reel Vienna: Contemporary Cinematic Images of the Imperial Capital"

This paper inserts itself within the “spatial turn” that, on the tail of a similar development in other disciplines such as geography, literature and cultural studies, reached film studies at the beginning of the 21s century. This perspective places spatiality at the center of our understanding of the world and human relationships, including cinema.

For Mark Shiel, film is more a spatial system than a textual system (2001, 6), by which he means that films are more about space than narrative. Robert Tally has argued that “the very idea of plot is also spatial, since a plot is also a plan, which is to say, a map” (2013:49). Rhodes and Gorfinkel argue that our experience of cinema is closely intertwined with our experience of place because of cinema’s special power to record place (2011, x). Films allow us to have an experience of real cities (and real locations in general) different from the one/s that we inhabit. As happens with the “Paris of the imagination” described by Italo Calvino (2004: 167), there are some cities that we encounter and live through films well before we have the chance to experience them first hand (if we ever do). This claim applies both to movies shot on location and to those in which space is recreated in a studio. Yet, as argued by Nowell-Smith, the former have the advantage that the locations we see in them are not there “merely to be bearers of signification”. As he puts it: “the fact of being able to work with real materials […] is a privilege which filmmakers neglect at their peril” (2001: 107)

When we look at movies through a spatial lens, the mise en scène of a film becomes an open door to the real places, their history and social and cultural realities. Spectators are invited to venture through this door and discover the secrets that the cinematic space holds for them–not only what the real places, whether recorded, reconstructed or a combination of both, may tell us about themselves, but also what the film may tell us about the place and its history. These cinematic discourses on a specific location (reel worlds) are for proponents of Geocriticism as real as the world of “cement, concrete and steel” (Westphal 2011: 3).

As an example of this spatial approach to films, this paper looks at the representation of the city of Vienna in two contemporary films: Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995) and The Woman in Gold (Simon Curtis, 2015). Unlike many other movies taking place in Vienna in silent or classical cinema (Conley 2016, Seibel 2017), the three films under analysis here were shot on location in the city. Through their choice of specific locations, each of them creates a specific map of Vienna (and a discourse about the city), highlighting some parts/meanings of the city and ignoring others. The three movies engage in different ways with Viennese history and with the cinematic Vienna myth of the Habsburg era, entering in a conversation with previous movies set in the city and with the “cement and stone” city itself.