Stefan Tiron wrote a great review of our feature film “Die Gstettensaga”.
I recently had the great satisfaction to watch a preview of a very fresh postapocalyptic feature film + a directorial debut, that premiered on Austria’s ORF in March this year. What I was asking myself this time was to try and appreciate an entirely different kind of algorithmic force that was once again set loose by Johannes Grenzfurthner (of monochrom fame) upon unsuspecting survivors of the last 35 years of road-warrior, post-nuke, after-the-bomb films.
As a friend just tweeted, now every Hollywood blockbuster seems to be written by some underlying algorithm. The end credits are just the cinematic equivalent to a CAPTCHA response – trying to identify the film crew as human, even if this last human verification test is untenable and obsolete.
Well, I kinda have this incredible (and maybe you do too!) and perverse desire to get to the bottom of actual directorial algorithms – trying very hard to enter the loop and be able to forget how Hollywood movie after movie manages to push an exact quota of car explosions, 3D makeover, eye-popping HD footage, hero worship, body count, family values, rescue missions ad infinitum into box office paradise.Let’s be clear, I’m overenthusiastic about Gstettensaga – because it is such a genre bender, a satiric H bomb, a horror movie and ex-auction house vaudeville going for the unexpected dialectical turns of current history, and leading us into the untrodden and definitely outrageous wastelands that could be populated by the likes of Surf Nazis Must Die, Escape from NY, Steel Dawn or America 3000.
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