VINYL (Tales from the Vienna Underground)

Colour, DIGIBETA
Austria, United Kingdom, 2011, 78 min
Section: 2011: A Musical Odyssey

Synopsis

A feature-length celebration of Vienna, its electronic musicians and its clubs. This huge film mosaic presents personalities on the city’s club scene (Kruder & Dorfmeister, Patrick Pulsinger), innovators and experimenters (Christian Fennesz, Noid, Philip Quehenberger), and the local reps of trash punk (Bulbul, Fuckhead). Dozens of musicians reflect on what stimulates them in a city hailed as one of the cultural metropolises of Europe. "In this film, vinyl is a metaphor for something we love, even for its imperfections and scratches, and so it is with these musicians’ love-hate relationship with their city.” The English director shot material in Vienna virtually every day over the course of three years. Over 1000 hours of footage were finally transformed into an image of a microcosm of today’s European city, resonating with inspiration from all possible cultures and historical eras.

About the director

Andrew Standen-Raz is an author, director, producer, cameraman and editor. He co-wrote the script for Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker? (2008) about the American writer and punk icon, which premiered at Rotterdam IFF. He collaborated on the multimedia performance The Persistence Show (2010) premiered at the Donau Festival. Andrew’s next film, shown at the MAK museum as a rough cut in 2010, reveals the current social and political atmosphere of Vienna, Vienna: Not Everything Will Be Taken into the Future.