Introduction: Austria and film in the twenty-first century

In 2006, Dennis Lim wrote that the propensity of recent films from Austria to focus on the 'negative and the abject' had made 'this tiny country […] something like the world capital of feel-bad cinema'. His provocation has since been so frequently invoked in discussions of contemporary Austrian film that it has become something of a cliché, whether to be challenged or confirmed. The late Frederick Baker, in his 2020 film essay Cinema Austria—Die ersten 112 Jahre [Cinema Austria—The First 112 Years], goes one step further, claiming that filmmakers now wear this seemingly negative label as a badge of pride. Interviews with three of the country's most prominent directors serve to prove his point. Barbara Albert thinks 'feel-bad movie' is an amusing expression ('lustiger Ausdruck'); it has something charming about it and implies comedy and humour. Jessica Hausner, meanwhile, says that it is actually feel-good movies that make her feel bad and the so-called feel-bad element of Austrian films is a source of huge relief for her: finally someone else is prepared to show things—the horror of dying, for example—as they really are, and she realizes she is not the only person with such preoccupations. Michael Haneke, while on the one hand dismissing the term as 'blöd' [stupid], sees it, on the other, as a 'positives Charakteristikum' [positive characteristic]; filmmakers are prepared to recognize that the world is far from 'in Ordnung' [all right]. In this way, feel-bad cinema is an important counter to filmic attempts to portray reality otherwise, attempts that, according to Haneke would only be made by liars, idiots, or cynics. Lim's descriptor can and has been dismissed as reductive and, as Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck write, 'only another totalizing concept' that the filmmakers with whom it has been associated would necessarily dismiss. Yet in its persistence it has proved more nuanced and revealing of significant elements of contemporary cinema than it might first appear.