Langsamer Sommer

John Cook, a Canadian fashion photographer who found himself in Vienna in the late 1960s, brought a glimpse of those cinematic renewal movements to Austria through his four films, made between 1972 and 1982 – movements that had swept through other European countries with far greater intensity in the preceding decades. His feature film debut *Langsamer Sommer* (Slow Summer), produced by Michael Pilz and shot on Super 8 on a shoestring budget (a 35mm blow-up was later made), positions itself close to the “real” lives of its protagonists—a loosely assembled group of Viennese bohemians—and their daily existence, defined by idleness and aimless drifting. Documentary in style and simultaneously recognisable as a construction through a film-within-a-film scenario, the film strings together a series of summer scenes defined above all by intensities (those of the characters, but also the moods of a given day). It is about nothing and yet about everything: a snapshot of the times, a reflection on one’s own state of mind, which is constantly changing, and, almost as an afterthought, a portrait of the city and the life hidden away in its alleyways. (D.K.)