Background
Axel Corti was born on 7 May 1933 in Paris.
(A Jewish youth is trying to avoid deportation to the camp...)
A Jewish youth is trying to avoid deportation to the camps by escaping to America. As he makes his way first to Prague, and then through France to Marseille, fixing underground, hoping for a boat, he meets a German officer who rebelled against Nazism, and was sent to and escaped from Dachau, who helps enlarge the movies sense of victimization.
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Axel Corti was born on 7 May 1933 in Paris.
Corti had a wandering childhood, living and being educated in Italy, Switzerland, England, Germany, and Austria, he studied German and Romance literature at university, but, as befits a determined survivor in unstable times, he had also acquired training as a farmer. While still in school he began working for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation as an actor and reporter. His career as a stage director began in 1958, and has included productions in Vienna, Berlin, Brussels, and Stuttgart, as well as work with Peter Brook in London.
He has directed films, from such varied sources as Frank Wedekind, Alfred Doblin, and Truman Capote. He has won several important awards, notably the Grosser Österreichischer Staatpreis für Filmkunst in 1976 (the only other recipient to date has been Billy Wilder), and the 1985 Prix Italia for A Woman’s Pale Blue Handwriting, a two-part film for television, adapted from Franz Werfel. Since 1972, he has also been a professor of film directing at the University of Vienna.
His major work is a trilogy, made with the w riter Georg Stefan Trailer, under the general title. Where To and Back, describing the fate of Austria and Austrians in the 1940s. In the first film (made for Austrian television originally), God Does Not Believe in Us Anymore, the setting is Vienna in 1938, on the morning after “Crystal Night."
Santa Fe
(Set entirely in New York (though a twenty-minute harbor s...)
(A Jewish youth is trying to avoid deportation to the camp...)
He was a realist whose appetite for fife, gesture, and place is inseparable from his moving camera and his reluctance to repeat camera setups. Without hysteria or ostentation, he was always shoving us new points of xiew in a human and social panorama in which there is so much ambiguity, caution, comparison, and irony that any naïve rash to judgment is drained of energy. We see people who have lied, cheated, and pretended in these films; but in the next instant we have to recognize that few resorts are more human or inevitable. Everyone is compromised. Not that Corti becomes cynical. He cherishes ideas and principles and the urge to be just. But he is faithful to the terrible straggle to stav alive, with dignity, in such times.
Axel Corti was the first in a great fine of Viennese filmmakers who actually worked in Vienna. He was the true successor to von Stroheim. Lang, Wilder, and Preminger. Think of the five of them and you can begin to appreciate an “Austrian attitude”—amused, wary, hopeful, sad, but strong.
