Viennale 2024

Like Hynes, Schwartz had been taking in several films a day for around a week by that point and found It’s Not Me to be “a much-needed burst of bliss . . . Carax has made a personal essay but also a dazzling cineaste’s symphony, stuffed with moments from Lumière onwards and from Carax’s own films, with bonus appearances by Denis Lavant and Baby Annette.”

It’s Not Me will open this year’s Viennale today “because it fits wonderfully into the cinematographic universe that I would like to see represented in the Viennale program,” says festival director Eva Sangiorgi. The forty-minute film “combines personal memories with communal ones to create a historical consciousness. It is a film that formulates an ethic of its craft, which I would also like to declare my manifesto for this edition of the festival.”

Denis Lavant, who appeared in Carax’s early features as something quite close to a stand-in for the director and in later films as the raging id Monsieur Merde, will be on hand when It’s Not Me screens again on Monday. As for Baby Annette, the puppet who starred alongside Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard in Carax’s last feature, the Sparks musical Annette (2021), who’s to say. But the New Yorker’s Richard Brody advises: “Under no circumstances should a viewer leave the theater during the end credits; there’s a tag scene—comedic, poignant, wryly self-referential, and spectacularly clever—that’s a mini-masterwork in itself.”

It’s Not Me is a response to a prompt from the Centre Pompidou in Paris: “Where are you at, Leos Carax?” At the time, Jean-Luc Godard, who died in the fall of 2022 by assisted suicide, was very much on Carax’s mind. “It’s Not Me is self-reflexive, political, and experimental, essentially Carax’s take on Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988),” writes Conor Williams at Reverse Shot. “Carax faithfully mimics Godard’s style and structure with a raspy voiceover, colorful intertitles that split the work into chapters, and garish visual filters. As with Godard, some ideas and themes are decipherable, others less so.”

For Diego Semerene at Slant, “the film’s most haunting moment” comes when Carax rolls out a clip from F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). A man from the country walks through reeds in the moonlight to meet a woman from the city, and the camera follows in a famously long and smooth tracking shot. Semerene notes that “Carax retires the narrator’s voice to pose the question in writing across the screen, which is worth stating it in its entirety: ‘In the beginning, when grips pushed the camera on its heavy cart to follow a man, one had the feeling that GOD was following the man with his heavy eyes. But today, if a boy follows his girlfriend with his cellphone camera, that feeling won’t be there. How to reclaim the gaze of the gods?’”

This year’s Viennale will run through October 29, but the Robert Kramer retrospective, copresented by the Austrian Film Museum, will carry on through November 28. Kramer, who died in 1999, was “a filmmaker committed to transforming the United States root and branch through political organizing and cinematic praxis,” writes David Fresko for Metrograph Journal. Kramer “shaped, as a potter molds clay, a self-critical cinema of political contemplation that found acceptance in Europe, where he relocated in 1979 and where, to this day, he is considered second only to Jean-Luc Godard in the pantheon of political modernists.”

Along with dozens of the year’s most-lauded films, Viennale 2024 will present programs dedicated to Mexico’s multidisciplinary Colectivo Los Ingrávidos; Brazilian filmmaker and editor Juliana Rojas (Cidade; Campo); Austrian actor and theater legend Helene Thimig; and Korean films set in the first half of the twentieth century, when Japan was the colonial ruler on the peninsula. The festival will then wrap with Mati Diop’s Dahomey, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin back in February.

In a little more than an hour, Diop (Atlantics) traces the return of twenty-six royal treasures stolen by French colonialists from the Kingdom of Dahomey to what is now the Republic of Benin. Statues speak, the Beninese gaze at the work and likenesses of their ancestors, and students debate the implications. As Michael Sicinski notes at In Review Online, among the questions raised are: “Why only twenty-six, out of hundreds? Are the Beninese people supposed to be grateful? . . . How does the deal between France and Benin recall nineteenth-century Dahomey’s collusion with the European slave trade? And as these works go from a Parisian to a Beninese museum, does that make them more accessible to anyone? How much does cultural memory really mean when so many people are in poverty?”

“In what’s possibly the film’s most engrossing moment,” writes Leonardo Goi at the Film Stage, Diop and editor Gabriel Gonzalez cut between the debate and “shots of young Beninese listening to it on their phones and laptops around the city. One gets the feeling that a whole generation is taking part in a debate that has less to do with a few antiquities being handed back than with the kind of future these students will have to chart for themselves and their country.”

“Dahomey is not a blustery polemic,” writes Erika Balsom at 4Columns. “Its aim is to chart the material act and political complexities of restitution from an African perspective—or, rather, African perspectives in the plural, for there is no single point of view to be found.” Dahomey “holds together disagreement, uncertainty, and hope in a way that somehow manages to be at once unsparingly economical and full of breathing room, rigorously devoted to detailing a process and yet unafraid to linger on a girl’s face, a whirring fan, or a lush garden.”