Canale Grande

A secret masterpiece of Austro-cinema and a prime example of film as subversive art. At the opening, a TV screen is painted over in black: The idea of an alternative medium is already glittering in the mind of the protagonist (played by Pezold herself). Her ‘Radio Free Utopia’ is intended to replace television with ‘close-up viewing’, ‘because everything is impersonal today anyway’. Cheekiness wins the day! Friederike's living room becomes a home studio where utopian fantasies are realised: A man gives birth to a baby, absurd performance festivals (‘mermaids having a wank’) replace the absence of test images and a kind of tombstone TV even reports on life after death. Canale Grande astounds with ever new staging ideas and agitates against the synchronisation of the media and the ‘shit’ with which they bombard the audience: ‘Make your own shit!’ The visionary nature of Pezold's mischievously anarchic proposal has become even more obvious in the Internet age. (Christoph Huber)

Julia Franz Richter reads from Friederike Pezold's unpublished autobiography

Photo: Austrian Film Museum