Kakanian Flyspecks: Film Criticism in Austria since the 1990s

Film criticism helped constitute what is now called New Austrian Cinema. This article looks at “short form” criticism in edited volumes and emerging journals that worked to establish this cinema’s coherence and prestige. The virtuous cycle inaugurated in the 1990s—when critics wrote with great acuity about recent films, and filmmakers seemed to work to meet heightened expectations—has continued with full-length monographs for a wider audience in the new millennium. This development, however, has not been without its detractors. Specifically, Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) can be interpreted as an ambivalent statement about the power of the critic.