Typen und Szenen aus dem Wiener Volksleben

Ordinary Folk Life in Vienna

Wiener Kunstfilm, the first major Austrian film production company, was founded in 1910 by the photographer Anton (Gustav) Kolm, his wife Luise Kolm-Veltée, and the cameraman Jacob Fleck to counter France’s domination of the Austro-Hungarian cinema market. This emblematic short film is an August Sander-like portrait of “ordinary folk life in Vienna” – radically different from the one depicted nearly a century later in Ulrich Seidl’s Good News.