Editing Gstettensaga

Jump to navigation Jump to search
Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.

The edit can be undone. Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then publish the changes below to finish undoing the edit.

Latest revision Your text
Line 1: Line 1:
== Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl ==
=== No ===
 
Screening and discussion at Noisebridge (postponed til end of August 2014).<br>
 
----
 
''(film review)''
 
The last two remaining superpowers – China and Google – start a war and end the world. This is how “Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl” starts, and it’s no-bullshit hilarity that you wish you could see on screen more often.
The feature was co-produced by art-tech group monochrom and their friends at the Viennese media collective Traum & Wahnsinn (German for Dream & Madness; what a name!).
 
Well, you expect high weirdness from a writer-director like Johannes Grenzfurthner, who fronts monochrom and is known for the freakiest shenanigans and the most thorough academic theories – and you get a lovin’ spoonful of all of it delivered through this production.
 
Decades after the disastrous “Google Wars,” a shady media tycoon (with a weakness for Boris Vallejo) hires a pestilent journalist and an over-enthusiastic technician to do the first live broadcast of (post)-post-war history, using the emerging medium of “Tele-O-Vision.” Who is to be interviewed? Echsenfriedl, a strange “pioneer of contraptions” who lives hidden in the hinterland (Austrian slang: “Gstetten”) of the Alpine fringes. It’s a quest to kick-start the future’s future. Will it succeed? Depends on how you define “success.”
 
“Die Gstettensaga” was shot in less than a week for 5000 Euros (quite a metric!), so it is clearly a super-low-budget endeavor; but it is neither trashy nor campy, except when it wants to be trashy or campy. The film is packed with nuggets of weirdness and wisdom, and the translator of the English subtitles cannot be praised highly enough.
 
Grenzfurthner’s doctrine, if there is one at all, is to do it yourself, to try, to make it happen, maybe fail, but to do so with levity, and never let yourself be blinded by the succubus of “wrong life.” It cannot be lived rightly, and many members of the oh-so-liberal hacker community should be more aware of their level of complicity with the ruling elite. Maybe they need postal officers with huge guns (flawlessly portrayed by Roland Gratzer and Evelyn Fürlinger) to remind them.
 
Thomas Weilguny’s cinematography is crisp, almost documentarian, and Sarah Strauss’ costumes are a real (cost-effective) joy. Tinsel-decorated, Crocs-wearing power-line-deniers never looked that swell.
 
Is there anything to criticize? Sure...here and there, but I’m not going to tell you, because what I could perceive as a flaw is probably another viewer’s favorite innuendo. Decide for yourself.
 
Noisebridge is mentioned in the title credits with a “special thanks,” and I’m glad the folks at our favorite SFO hackerspace helped make it possible.
 
-''pwn'' (April 2014)
 
----
 
Links:<br>
http://www.monochrom.at/gstettensaga<br>
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3296276/<br>
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/9902996/Die.Gstettensaga_-_The.Rise.of.Echsenfriedl_-_2014.EngSubs.HDRip
 
[[Category:Events]]
Please note that all contributions to Noisebridge are considered to be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (see Noisebridge:Copyrights for details). If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!

To protect the wiki against automated edit spam, we kindly ask you to solve the following CAPTCHA:

Cancel Editing help (opens in new window)