A Cinema of Melancholy and Disillusionment: Investigating the Work of Austrian Film Director Willi Forst

This paper intends to critically reflect on the work of Austrian film director Willi Forst. Forst has been widely regarded as one of the great names in the history of German-speaking cinema, and in discussing Forst’s work, scholars have repeatedly pointed to the close connection between Forst’s films and Austria’s history and cultural tradition. In fact, Forst has been often labeled as the most Austrian film director, typically associating Forst’s work with the musical genre and the so-called Viennese Film, of which Forst has been regarded as the indisputable master. If the remark is true that Forst’s films were significantly permeated by an Austrian note, what does this mean? This question shall stand in the focus of this paper which, in investigating the influence of Austria’s culture on Forst’s work, will seek for an element of Forst’s affinity for it in the aesthetics and ideology which informed Forst’s oeuvre, with the aim to shed light on some facets of Forst’s work to which less attention seems to have been paid so far