Viennale 2025: A place of pasts and presents

When Jean Epstein wrote about “approaching the promised land, a place of great wonders,”¹ in the early 1920s, he was referring to a metaphorical topos, the time-place of a future in which cinema was blooming with endless possibilities. A century later, the death of the medium is still being proclaimed on a monthly basis – the inevitable consequence of studio/streamer mergers, encroaching AI use, and the continuous flare-ups of war and genocidal campaigns across the globe. Even as he saw enormous potential in that young art form, Epstein himself recognised that cinema was both art and industry, “like two Siamese twins joined together at the stomach.”² Yet, year after year of attending 20+ festivals, I find myself completely surrendering to one “place of great wonders” in particular: the Viennale.

The 63rd Viennale ran between 16–28 October 2025, and featured a big retrospective of Jean Epstein, organised in partnership with the Austrian Film Museum, as well as contemporary festival gems like Lucrecia Martel’s Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks, 2025), Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf (2025) and the opening film, Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 (Mirrors No. 3, 2025), which I caught at the glorious Gartenbaukino. It’s a rare treat to attend the opening of a festival as a freelance critic whose stay is determined by the amount of film to watch and pieces to file, and an even rarer one to see Petzold’s latest film introduced by the director himself, newly appointed Viennale President, succeeding legendary producer Eric Pleskow, who held the position from 1998 until his death in 2019. The German director was brief in his speech, acknowledging the disbelief and honour of holding such a representative position at a festival he called “my favourite narrative of the year.” 

In the words of artistic director Eva Sangiorgi, films are a way of seeing clearly, especially in times of crisis. “I found cinema to be a place where I can breathe. Cinema forces us to pause, to stop moving, to simply sit and watch until the very last frame and that act of pausing has become one of the most precious spaces we can be ourselves today,” she said in her opening speech. That clarity Sangiorgi spoke of can seem unattainable through other means, when the reality around us – wars, crises, weaponised political incompetence, climate catastrophes – is in such desperate need of rearranging. With its conscious and continuous efforts to provide cinemagoers, filmmakers, and the films themselves a space to pause, the Viennale can turn the narrowing gap between past and present into something salubrious.

The Prater’s Ferris Wheel, as seen in The Third Man (left) and Before Sunrise (right)

The city of Vienna is a treasure trove that makes film pilgrimages easy, from the Prater Ferris wheel – featured most prominently in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) – to the conjoined Wiener Konzerthaus and the Akadamietheater on Lothringerstraße, seen in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste, 2001). But this year, the InterContinental Hotel, sitting opposite the Stadtpark in central Vienna, became for me the starting point of another kind of film expedition. Getting to know an enclosed space so intimately on screen before spending a few days inside it was a first for me. Renowned for its classic Viennese elegance and Art Deco touches, the hotel’s reputation precedes it, and rarely is there a Viennale attendee forgetting to mention the Intermezzo, a stylish bar on the ground floor dominated by an opulent crystal chandelier and decorated with mahogany, plush carpets, and golden flourishes. When staying at the InterContinental during the Viennale, you’re not just a guest. You’re inadvertently doing field work. And if you first visit after having seen Gastón Solnicki’s The Souffleur (2025), shot almost entirely inside the hotel, you’re promoted to chief anthropologist. 

Solnicki’s latest opens with black and white archival footage showing the building’s inauguration. A soft Bach sonatina plays in the background, its piano plunks setting the film’s melancholic tone even before you hear it emanating from the voice of its protagonist. Lucius Glanz (Willem Dafoe) is the longstanding manager of the Hotel InterContinental Vienna, “the first luxury brand hotel in the world and the first one to have telephones in every bathroom,” as he introduces it. Lucius likens the hotel to a ship, and expands on the metaphor with bridges, decks, and rooms as cabins opening into the hallways. This early in the film, the aggrandizement may feel unearned. But knowing Solnicki’s preference for micro-histories and places of significant sociopolitical overlap, I doubt The Souffleur was ever designed to truthfully capture the scale of the building and its monumentality. His A Little Love Package (2022), an ode to Vienna and to the now banned art of smoking inside its iconic cafes, radiated a genuine fascination with the chronotope as a peculiar, philosophically laden concept. 

The word’s ancient Greek roots suggest a composite of time (chronos) and space (topos); though the concept was once associated with science, literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin appropriated it in the early 20th century to account for time and space in literature. Narrative time, in literature as in film, is different from time as we experience it in our daily lives: the former can be compressed, condensed, slowed down, stop and start on command, while the latter simply passes. Chronotopes are at the centre of Solnicki’s films; more than the mourning of something past, they are about the sense of place one can regain through cinema. 

One of the InterContinental Hotel’s many hallways (left), and a view of the Intermezzo Bar (right). Polaroids courtesy of the author.

As one can imagine, stepping into the InterContinental and sitting at the lobby bar on the same stool I saw Willem Dafoe perched on when The Souffleur premiered in Venice was rather discombobulating. It’s not the same as actually seeing Dafoe in the flesh, but you’d be forgiven for feeling a little star-struck nonetheless. This was where the story took place and where the film was shot, and thrumming all through The Souffleur is Lucius’ anxious wish to preserve the hotel as it is. But the Intercontinental has been sold to an Argentinian developer, and the future change of ownership is set to spell the end of life as he knows it. “This is my house,” Lucius says, as the film introduces us to his daughter and employee Lilly (Lilly Lindner), their comedic moments of intimacy including playing miniature chess on the hotel’s rooftop and serious conversations in the service elevators. 

Intimacy between the four walls of the InterContinental is at the film’s core. Yet the hotel is never simply a setting. Could the famed chandelier be a mere backdrop? A scene-stealer, with its angular shape and crystal glimmer, it was the subject of many conversations over the few days I spent in town. A friend of mine, for example, commented on how pompous it would look out of context – how, seen anywhere other than the InterContinental’s bar, the chandelier would expose a certain retrograde strive for antiquated luxury. His observation stayed with me and made me reconsider the nature of decor and props in real places. How objects – especially centrepieces like this chandelier – could become an organising principle to a film’s emotional currents. The glint of the chandelier reflected in the crystal-clear dry martini I was served gave off the kind of mirrored luxe you’d expect a film about the “InterConti” would exude. 

Lucius’s inability to let go never registers as puerile, and that’s largely because Dafoe, even in his more comedic roles, carries himself with immutable gravitas. In The Souffleur, he narrates the Hotel’s history as well as his own life, and, most interestingly, that of his nemesis, Facundo Ordoñez, the businessman hellbent on buying the hotel. Played by Solnicki himself, Facundo is an Argentinian who, as a small child, was bewitched by the Viennese hotel. While this is never made explicit, it soon transpires that the man is a playful caricature of a proprietor, coloured with images of the director’s family archives. Curiously, the fictional Facundo also features in the thank you credits, alongside Sangiorgi and Franz Kafka.

But of course, Lucius is not alone. He wanders in and out of the frame (traversing rooms, hallways, an ice-skating ring), which he shares with people and hotel guests the director has befriended over his years attending the Viennale. Nonprofessional actors surround Defoe, adding a kind of zest to his performance that’s both reactive and very touching. As we spoke about their collaboration back in September, Solnicki relayed the following anecdote: “Willem [Dafoe] was very keen to work with me that way, but there was a point when he asked me: “Gastí, you can’t possibly expect me to pull a rabbit out of a hat every day!” And I said, “Willem, what do you think our work is?”³

“Hotels, like cinemas, are windows to the world,” the director recently told Austrian Films.⁴  When talking about the InterContinental within the context of his Viennese trilogy, which concludes with The Souffleur, Solnicki speaks of the hotel as “just an opening to the film, to Vienna, and also to connect with the main character [Lucius Glanz], who, like myself, is not from the city, but strongly connected to it, and we follow in the film his fight to preserve an aspect of a world that he feels is fading away.”

Regardless, the film offers a multifaceted look at the building through its practical parts, underscoring its functionality and lush decor. The ballroom, restaurant, back corridors, service entrances, laundry room, uniform closet, even the rooftop from where Lucius takes in the panoramic view of Vienna: The Souffler makes access to all those spaces (and the people who inhabit them) feel like a gift. Mesmerising crane shots show the glossy ice rink from above as a place where disgruntled Lucius can silently retreat and hose the ice. There’s also an early, over-the-shoulder tracking shot that follows him into the kitchen, and, later in the film, another tracking shot that frames him from the front instead, making for a kind of counterpoint to that previous sequence. As the film unfurls across the hotel and city in a maze of paths, you might feel as though you’re guiding him on his journey, too.

The Souffler

Piano music features prominently in The Souffler, where characters take turns to play the grand piano at the Intermezzo bar. Among them is Han Gyeol Lie, who’s played the instrument in all of Solnicki’s Viennese films, and director and producer Stephanie Argerich, who learned a piece by Bach without being a pianist herself, and performed it in the film – likely playing the very same piano I saw nested in one corner of the Intermezzo. The bar is the festival’s unofficial nighttime hangout, all the more convenient for those of us lucky enough to stay at the InterContinental, and it was still early in the festival when John C. Reilly, in town with his latest vehicle, Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s Heads or Tails? (Testa o croce?, 2025), approached the instrument. Time came to a halt. Was he going to play? 

“No, I wanted to sing,” he told me the next morning. The piano was already locked for the night; once the staff rushed to open the fallboard, it turned out there was no one to accompany Reilly and play it. I’m sure a good few of us, myself included, were hoping to see the actor morph into his musical alter ego, Mister Romantic – whose debut album was released earlier this year. I wondered whether shooting Heads or Tails?, in which Reilly plays the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody, influenced in any way the actor’s work on Mister Romantic. In the film, a western set in post-unification Italy centred on the doomed romance between Rosa (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and Ercole (Alessandro Borghi), Reilly’s Buffalo Bill stands as a cynical and distant observer. A far cry from Mister Romantic – an imaginary character who rises from the dead just to fall in love with someone in the audience. “I was already doing Mr. Romantic for a couple of years before I did this film,” the actor said. “But whether Buffalo Bill [the character] is cynical, I don’t know about that. As a show business personality, he was someone who was obsessed with stories and that’s what made his show – the supposedly true story of the Indian Wars – and what created the myth of the West. The Italian spaghetti Westerns for that matter were a result of the growing popularity of those stories and dime-novels.” Reilly was referring to the works of Emilio Salgari, the Italian writer of adventure swashbucklers who famously met Buffalo Bill in Rome and ended up influencing Sergio Leone. But there was something to the way he spoke about his character’s stardom that seemed to resonate with acting more broadly. “There is a certain cynicism to everyone who’s in show business,” he admitted, “because we see the inside of the story; we know that we’re manipulating things in order to tell a story. It’s like a magician knowing the trick, so is it cynical or is it just more realistic? I’m not sure.”

A view of Vienna’s Stadtpark (left), and a portrait of Mister Romantic, aka John C. Reilly (right). Polaroids courtesy of the author.

Heads or Tails?, like the directing duo’s previous films, has roots in Italian folklore. Zoppis and Righi cast their period films in a mythical mould, where time is thinned out and made abstract, and the present speaks through characters like a skilled ventriloquist. Inspired by legends and myths passed through generations in the country’s rich oral tradition, Zoppis and Righi’s are the rare films that can conjure up stories you wholeheartedly believe in. The post-unification Italy that serves as backdrop in Heads or Tails? is a land to which Buffalo Bill’s Circus had already brought the myth of the American West. In 1890, while in Rome, Buffalo Bill reportedly challenged some Italian cowboys, known as butteri, to a rodeo contest. The locals easily won, and Heads or Tails? follows their captain, Ercole, as he wrestles with the aftermath of his victory. American lore and local legends intertwined. 

Then came my last night at the Viennale. While Zoppis, Righi, and Reilly were off presenting Heads or Tails? to the Stadtkino audience, I found myself at the festival dinner, sitting next to pianist, composer and improviser Meg Morley, who performed a live score for the screening of Jean Epstein’s La Belle Nivernaise (1924) I had just come back from. Before the film, Morley had been introduced as a resident silent film pianist at the British Film Institute in London, though she also performs and composes for international silent film festivals, including Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato. The story of an abandoned boy who’s adopted by a bargeman and winds up falling in love with his daughter, La Belle Nivernaise is as interested in the young romance as it is in the river the boat traverses and the messy family dynamics aboard the ship, and Morley’s restless improvisations were a perfect match for the film’s tonal shifts. She approached the themes with a certain levity, adjusting the rhythm whenever scenes became tense. Nothing surprising about a score fitting the visuals, but it was at those moments, when the film felt most ambiguous, that I could detect her compositions tugging me in a more emotionally charged direction. Far from manipulative, her work was gentle and playful – I could tell she kept one ear open to the audience and would delicately tune into their responses, an ability that made this screening the most special of the whole festival. Cinémathèque Française founder Henri Langlois had praised the La Belle Nivernaise for “its perfect simplicity and need to make everything subordinate to the subject”. What was most beautiful about this particular viewing is that, thanks to Morley’s craft, it seemed to open up a new meaning of the phrase “subordinate to the subject”.

A few days earlier, Epstein’s retrospective opened with a digital restoration of La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928) from a colour-tinted 35mm print whose icy-blue hues made the film’s wintertime opening scene appear significantly more glacial. The story, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Oval Portrait and The Fall of the House of Usher, is told in close-ups and medium shots, with the occasional wide shots turning the mansion’s interiors into a monumental, high-ceilinged prison of secrets. It is there that Roderick Usher obsesses over an oil painting of his – a portrait of his beautiful wife Madeleine. But the closer the portrait comes to completion, the faster she seems to wane. Her face, like his on occasion, is glimmering white; this phosphorescent quality is central to Epstein’s impressionistic touch, and the restoration honours that luminosity by keeping close-ups of their faces bright, almost overexposed. In those cases, it’s the eyes that ground the picture, their contrast so heavy that it feels like they’re meeting the viewer’s gaze. “It is there that she is truly alive!” exclaims Usher via intertitles, agonising over Madeleine’s loss.

The Fall of the House of Usher

Austrian experimental duo Drank (Ingrid Schmoliner & Alexander Kranabetter) played a piece they’d especially composed for the screening, wrapping the film in layers of dark loops and drones, their contemporary textures – full of reverberations, clanking, and noise – disintegrating in tune with Usher’s own slippery grasp of time. Epstein’s slow motions, double exposures, and other in-camera tricks, manipulate the flow of time to such an extent that the film feels virtually unmoored to it. Perhaps this is why Drank decided to accommodate a narrative fracture in their score: towards the end, sampled words in German seemed to decompose in some ghostly way, and their disintegration felt incessant. It was a modern touch that certainly wasn’t to everyone’s taste (I could sense mild disapproval in Petzold’s hurried exit from the auditorium as soon as the screening ended), but it fitted Epstein’s overlay of time and space, even if it addressed the spectral elements of his Poe adaptation in a rather literal way. 

Back at the dinner table, sitting between Morley and the Heads or Tails? team, I could feel something brewing. Sangiorgi introduced the pianist to John C. Reilly, and the two were chatting about music when she mentioned Christian Petzold’s 2024 Phoenix, in which a piano piece plays a pivotal narrative role. As she started humming the song, Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low”, like Nina Hoss’s character in the film, an idea seemed to be taking shape. 

No, Reilly did not recreate that memorable scene, but a couple of hours later he came down to the Intermezzo bar with his white stripe suit and hat. This time, when he approached the piano, he was quickly joined by Morley; a round of applause erupted before silence set in. What followed was a mini concert by Mister Romantic, where Reilly performed some beloved classics, including “Moonlight Serenade” and “La Vie en Rose”, with Morley’s piano as a fitting companion. ‘Could you love someone forever? Could you be loved forever?’, his crooner persona seemed to ask through those songs, and the inviting tone of his performance made that longing for connection palpable, yet never desperate. It was as if every one of us, improvised audience members of an improvised show, had been invited to dance and float in the clouds, if only for a little bit. Places are ephemeral, and so is the InterContinental, but while we’re there, they hold us as much as we hold on to them – the same way films watch over us as much as we watch them. 

Viennale
16 – 28 October 2025
https://www.viennale.at/en

Endnotes