Cinema of Austria

Cinema of Austria
The Gartenbaukino in Vienna during the Vienna International Film Festival 2010
No. of screens	577 (2011)[1]
• Per capita	7.6 per 100,000 (2011)[1]
Main distributors	Uip 17.6% Warner Bros. 16.4% Constantin 14.4%[2]
Produced feature films (2011)[3]
Fictional	35
Animated	-
Documentary	19
Number of admissions (2011)[5]
Total	15,752,844
• Per capita	1.98 (2012)[4]
Gross box office (2011)[5]
Total	€124 million

Cinema of Austria refers to the film industry based in Austria. Austria has had an active cinema industry since the early 20th century when it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that has continued to the present day. Producer Sascha Kolowrat-Krakowsky, producer-director-writer Luise Kolm and the Austro-Hungarian directors Michael Curtiz and Alexander Korda were among the pioneers of early Austrian cinema. Several Austrian directors pursued careers in Weimar Germany and later in the United States, among them Fritz Lang, G. W. Pabst, Josef von Sternberg, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, and Otto Preminger.

Between the two World Wars, directors like E. W. Emo and Henry Koster - the latter of whom had emigrated from Austria, provided examples of Austrian film comedies. At the same time, Willi Forst and Walter Reisch founded the Wiener Film genre. After Austria had become a part of Nazi Germany in 1938, Vienna's Wien-Film production company became an important studio for seemingly non-political productions. In the aftermath of World War II, Austria's film production soon restarted, partially supported by the Allied Forces. Veteran and new directors such as Ernst Marischka, Franz Antel, Geza von Cziffra, Geza von Bolvary and Walter Kolm-Veltee revised the comedy, provincial Heimatfilm, and biopic traditions, and began a new genre of the opulent imperial epic (e.g. Marischka's Sissi films and Antel's imperial era musicals) which rivaled Hollywood entertainment at the international box office.

The 1950s brought Austria the largest film production boom in its history, but without a neorealist or New Wave school, which had revitalized other European cinemas during this era, and with no national subsidies, the commercial Austrian film industry collapsed by 1968 and experimental film remained very limited. By the 1970s, television had become the medium for entertainment film, the short films of the radical Viennese Actionism movement rejected narrative structure completely, and Austria's alpine landscape as well some of its directors and actors were used for West German sex comedy productions.

With national subsidy arriving in 1981, a new generation of Austrian filmmakers established themselves at home and international festivals in the 1980s and 90s, among them Axel Corti, Niki List, Paul Harather, Michael Haneke, Barbara Albert, Harald Sicheritz, Stefan Ruzowitzky and Ulrich Seidl. In the first decade of the 21st century, Austrian cinema found its long-delayed New Wave and international critical success.

Austrian or Austrian-identifying actors who have achieved international success from the 1920s to the present include Erich von Stroheim, Elisabeth Bergner, Joseph Schildkraut, Paul Henreid, Hedy Lamarr, Walter Slezak, Oskar Homolka, Nadja Tiller, Senta Berger, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Maximilian Schell, Maria Schell, Romy Schneider, Oskar Werner, Vanessa Brown, Gusti Huber, Curd Jürgens, Lotte Lenya, Kurt Kasznar, Marisa Mell, Helmut Berger, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Christoph Waltz.