in cooperation with Radio Ö1

A highlight of this year’s festival is the Spotlight Feature dedicated to filmmaker Ferry Radax. Ferry Radax is a cult figure of the Austrian film scene – he is an author, director, cameraman and cutter all rolled into one. Due to the fact that his extraordinary work (approx. 130 films in 60 years) has been out of the public eye in the last few years, it is the aim of this year’s spotlight feature to make it accessible once more to a broader public by means of a selection of his films. Ferry Radax, who is celebrating his 80th birthday, will be a guest at this year’s Diagonale festival.

Radax, born in Vienna in 1932, began his artistic career with virtually no budget at all. He struggled as an architect, a painter and a press photographer, before coming upon work as an assistant in the production of The Third Man (1949) and An diesen Abenden (1951). In collaboration with his flatmate Peter Kubelka, the 1955 award-winning experimental film Mosaik im Vertrauen, came to fruition.
From the beginning, his films were characterized by collage and montage techniques that distill the visual narrative down to its bare essentials, thereby deliberately subverting the viewer’s expectations. In the Viennese Art Club, an important post-war artistic gathering place for painters, poets and literary figures, the avant-gardist met up with future celebrities like H.C. Artmann, Arik Brauer, Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Ernst, people he would go on to create cinematic portraits of in subsequent years. With the film Sonne Halt! (1959–62), the foremost work in his career, an intimate collaboration with the young poet Konrad Bayer began, whose texts inspired the film in which he shines in a double role. This experimental masterpiece is remarkable for its surreal picture montages and fantastic wordplay. The trade press describes it as “semantic fireworks,” “a kaleidoscope of field-associations” and “a milestone in avant-garde film.” Radax and Bayer attempted to unify their literary and cinematic work in the years that followed; Konrad Bayer’s suicide in 1964, however, put a sudden end to a close friendship. Ferry Radax processed this misfortune in the award-winning portrait KONRAD BAYER oder die welt bin ich und das ist meine sache (1969/1970), whereby he also established himself with the WDR. Together with the German broadcaster he produced two additional works inspired by Bayer, Der Kopf des Vitus Bering (1970) and Berg Berg (1972), as well as his celebrated portrait of Thomas Bernhard: Thomas Bernhard – Drei Tage (1970).

Longevity and a compression of essentials is what characterize his films, explains the prolific filmmaker time and again in interviews. Moreover, for him it is vital that the film have a theme, which transcends the real world, for nothing is so dull as the reality depicted in the daily news. Well into the 1990s Radax continued to work alongside German broadcasters. After the second film about Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Leben in Spiralen (1995–1998), he devoted himself more intensively to painting. For the past few years, this radical nonconformist has been working on a new portrait. This time, however, it isn’t Thomas Bernhard, H.C. Artmann or Konrad Bayer that are depicted; it’s Radax himself. In this singular art of the autobiography, he traces his own history. He returns to the places of his childhood and confronts his own past. We catch but a glimpse of the filmmaker himself, but his voice is ever-present. The Diagonale will offer a first-ever cinematic screening of his newest film, Videographie I – Vestenötting (1945).

Diagonale 2012 presents:

Program 1
Am Rand
Forum Dichter Graz
Introduction: Alfred Kolleritsch

Program 2
Testament
Sonne halt!
Introduction: Michael Omasta

Program 3
KONRAD BAYER oder die welt bin ich und das ist meine sache
Thomas Bernhard – Drei Tage
Introduction:Christhart Burgmann

Program 4
Werbefilme
Videographie I – Vestenötting 1945
Introduction: Otmar Schöberl

Program 5
Capri – Musik die sich entfernt
Introduction: Josef Schweikhardt

Program 6
Der Kopf des Vitus Bering
H.C. Artmann
Introduction: Otto Mörth