Contact High

Before that (only on 21 March):
All My Life
Bruce Baillie. US, 1966, 16mm, colour, 3 min
Haiku
Michael Glawogger; director of photography: Anton Mathis, Johann Eder; actors: Barbara Zuber. AT, 1987, 35mm, colour, 3 min

With its inexhaustible inventiveness, Contact High is a kind of Glawogger quintessence: this time, the main characters of Nacktschnecken embark on a hallucinatory odyssey to bring a dubious bag from Poland to Vienna for a gangster boss: While the assignment turns into a farce in the spirit of Louis de Funès in the best comedy of mistaken identity style, various intoxicants and miraculous interventions provide for crazy visions. The disco becomes a zoo and the hotel room shrinks to the size of a doll: "Alice in Wonderland" and underground comix are important references, but the breathtaking frenzy of associations by Glawogger (and Ostrowski) turns Contact High into an incomparable trip, which suddenly shifts into reverse gear exactly in the middle of the film, to Captain Beeefheart's "Mirror Man"! For Glawogger, the strongest hallucinogen remains the cinema itself, and he unleashes its sometimes undreamt-of possibilities with the help of congenial collaborators. The middle section of the sex-drugs-and-rock'n'roll comedy trilogy marks a quantum leap: from the likeable low-budget aesthetics of nudibranchs to a colourful, effects-laden film wonderland. (C.H.)

Photo: Austrian Film Museum