Film
Gerda Lerner: Film, Politics and Activism. Gerda Lerner (1920–2013) is widely recognized as a pioneering feminist historian, yet her contributions to film remain largely understudied. This project addresses a critical gap by examining her involvement in independent filmmaking, political activism, and the intersection of Jewish and Black civil rights alliances during the McCarthy era and…
Discovering Karol Rathaus is a feature-length documentary chronicling the life and legacy of Jewish-Austrian composer Karol Rathaus, a major figure in European modernism and the first professor of composition at Queens College, CUNY. Through archival research and international filming across Vienna, Berlin, London, and Ternopil, the film explores Rathaus’s forced emigration, his music, and his…
When filmmaker Marlo Poras’ grandmother escaped Nazi occupied Austria, she was stripped of her citizenship and everything she owned. Now Austria is offering Marlo the chance to “reclaim” her grandmother’s citizenship for herself. The Escape, a documentary film, follows Marlo’s journey deep into the Alps to unearth an unsettling family history that has haunting lessons…
The Austrian-born artist Erika Giovanna Klien (1900-1957), young promise of European modern art, arrives in the United States in 1929, a few days after the Wall Street Crash. As a single mother of an illegitimate child, she left to a step family in Austria, she was looking for a chance in the art world to…
Together with her daughter Leonille Wittgenstein and son Constantin Wittgenstein, celebrated Swiss-Hungarian actress Sunnyi Melles, who has i.a. performed the role of Jedermann’s lover (Buhlschaft) at the Salzburg Festival 1990-1993, will trace the eventful journey of Max Reinhardt’s life in a multimedial way, by reading from writings and contemporary documents, with music and sound design…
This project focuses on Jewish filmmakers, actors, and film technicians forced to leave Germany after the Nazi’s rise to power, many of whom went first to Austria and worked in the independent film industry that existed there between 1933 and 1937. The project will examine how these independent films engage with the experience of persecution…
Tilly Losch: Interstitial Modernism between Vienna and Hollywood offers the first book-length analysis of the life and extensive corpus of works by the Austrian-Jewish dancer, choreographer, film star, painter, and celebrity Tilly Losch (1903-75). Redressing critical neglect of her work, the book will resituate Losch in the interstices of conventional definitions of modernist cultural practice.…
The Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) is hosting an online conference in conjunction with an on-campus symposium that explores the manifold relationships between mountains and cinema. A special focus of this conference will be on transatlantic encounters and historical trajectories that connect Central European and North American film cultures. The…
The Nanovic Institute for European Studies received a BIAAS grant for a 2.5-day workshop dedicated to creating a “moral biography” of the 1921 US-Austria Peace Treaty. On August 24, 1921, the United States and Austria signed a Peace Treaty in Vienna in the aftermath of the First World War. This step was necessary for peace…
Leon Botstein and The Bard Music Festival received a BIAAS grant for its exploration of the life, work, and legacy of Austrian composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Korngold and His World: Bard Music Festival 2019 took take place at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, in August 2019.