Fooling around with Film: Political Visions of Austria——Past, Present and Future

Abstract

This article takes as its focus of study two films released at the beginning of the Noughties that use the documentary mode to satirical ends. These films might be said to represent two types of ‘fake’ documentary or mock-documentary, in the first case within a film that styles itself with all the codes and conventions of a classic information film (Walter Wippersberg’s Die Wahrheit uber Osterreich) and, in the other (Peter Kern’s 1. April 2021 – Haider lebt), a film whose near-future setting marks it as fiction but which foregrounds the investigative activities of a protagonist setting out to make a ‘documentary’ film about contemporary Austria. Both films, I argue, draw their impetus from the political ‘Wende’ of 1999/2000 and can be taken as cultural contributions to the domestic as well as international protest at the inclusion of the populist, extreme right-wing party, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) into Austria’s coalition government of February 2000.