World Film Locations: Vienna

"World Film Locations: Vienna" provides a panorama of international motion pictures shot on location in Austria's once imperial capitol, Vienna. The volume will contain informative reviews of 46 film scenes and evocative essays about key themes, ideas and historical periods that for the first time examines Vienna's relationship to cinema outside the waltz fantasies shot in the studios of Hollywood, London, Paris, Berlin...and Vienna. The book will be illustrated with scene specific screen-grabs, and images of these locations as they currently appear, as well as city maps that include location information for investigating "cinematic Vienna." Scene reviews, theme specific essays and illustrations will reveal a Vienna at the crossroads of a turbulent history, as a source of great music and literature, and as a site of world-famous architecture raging from gothic cathedrals and baroque palaces to Jugendstil (Vienna's art nouveau) and landmark early modern experiments, to the eco-challenges of the postmodern. The volume will explore how these sites contribute to film and shape the world's imagination regarding the city. Spotlight essays will cover the images that evoke the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the pioneering filmmaking of Willi Forst and Walter Reisch in the 1930s; Vienna's ambiguous role in the entertainment cinema of the Third Reich; opulent royal epics of the 1950s and the city as backdrop for international moviemaking from such directors and producers as Otto Preminger, Walt Disney, Nicolas Roeg, Maximilian Schell, and Richard Linklater; Jewish filmmakers and their take on lost cultural imagery; Vienna's role as a Cold War site for intrigue - from "The Third Man" to "James Bond"; and a startling New Wave cinema from filmmakers such as Michael Haneke, Barbara Albert, and Ulrich Seidl who find a "different" Vienna.