Radetzkymarsch
Austria,
1994, 300 min
Shown in 1995
CREDITS
- dir
-
Axel Corti, Gernot Roll
- prod
-
Michael Wolkenstein
- scr
-
Georges Conchon, Louis Gardel, Eric Orsenna
- cam
-
Gernot Roll
- editor
-
Ulrike Pahl
- cast
-
Max von Sydow, Charlotte Rampling, Tilman Gunther, Elena Sofia Ricci, Claude Rich
- source
-
ORF
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
OTHER
A memorable event at the 1987 San Francisco International Film Festival was the introduction of Axel Corti’s “Where To and Back” trilogy: God Does Not Believe in Us Anymore, Santa Fe and Welcome in Vienna. The next year the Festival played Corti’s earlier film, A Woman’s Pale Blue Handwriting. In sum, these works helped reveal Corti as a director in the great Viennese tradition of Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang. Corti died in 1994 (in his early 60s) as he was making Radetzky March, based on Joseph Roth’s epic novel about the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire as seen through the increasingly compromised life of one army officer, Carl Joseph von Trotta. The project was then taken over by the film’s cameraman, Gernot Roll. The result, shot on video, has the gradual unfolding of a classic novel. But it is also marked by Corti’s clear-eyed sympathy for people who betray others and themselves. Corti was a camera stylist and surely Roll understood that. The film is illumined by three actresses as women in von Trotta’s life—Elena Sofia Ricci, Julia Stemberger and Charlotte Rampling. In addition, Max von Sydow plays Carl’s autocratic father, and Claude Rich is outstanding as a sad Jewish doctor subtly cuckolded by our “hero.”
—David Thomson
FACTOID #162
The Stand-In (1985), Nina Takes a Lover (1994), Dream for an Insomniac (1996), Dream with the Fishes (1997), Teknolust (2002) and Dopamine(2003) were not only screened at Festival but were also shot in San Francisco.
