Drehli Robnik

The speculations of popular cinema are never identical to and never independent from political concepts. Serving as indexes to current and historical power relations, mainstream films propose specific ways of living and dying, of lying and speaking the truth, of forming alliances and negotiating conflict – they "make sense." At the same time, they invite us into a realm of the senses where objects and feelings move to a different drumbeat. In film and politics, agency and insight often rear their heads in unexpected places. As Siegfried Kracauer has observed: "Effects can at any time turn into causes." In his books and articles, Austrian critic and theorist Drehli Robik has investigated this contested terrain for more than three decades. The depth and esprit of his approach place him in a tradition which Jean-Pierre Gorin has called "the way of the termite" – a mode of thinking that finds unconventional paths towards "White Elephants" and supposedly minor subjects alike. This volume collects some of Robnik's most significant scholarly essays, contributions to pop music magazines and film journals, and samples from his work as a philosophical "edutainer." It draws the map of a cultural-political battleground where Colonel Landa and Private Ryan, Monsieur Hulot and Dr. Strangelove, Barbara Loden's loner and Jordan Peele's collective of "Us" all have their reasons.

? Films, in their generic, stylistic, and rhetorical variety, are modes of experience that provide a sense for the unexpected dynamics of urban life and historical reality. This understanding of cinema, as loving as it is theoretical, inspired the writings on film which form a central part of the wide-ranging work of Austrian historian Siegfried Mattl. From the political imaginary of well-known "historical films" by Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, John Woo, and Todd Haynes, to inter-war comedies and post-war educational films highlighting the changing socio-economic textures of Vienna, and on to amateur films that offer surprising views of how Austrians adapted themselves to Nazism or consumer culture, Mattl´s investigations are rich in historical context and re-evaluated material. Written with humor and a critical view of power relations, his essays and studies – some published for the first time – also enter into dialogues with Siegfried Kracauer's and Jacques Rancière's concepts of cinema's historicity. Exploring imagescapes of Red Vienna, of Haneke's white, or of Dylan's blues, Mattl invites us to look back at, and look out for, the ephemera that make up history.