- Haunted by a painting of his grandparents seated in their living room, director Joseph Koerner unearths in Vienna the remarkable story behind a vanished interior.
- The Burning Child is a story about Vienna. It is a film journey into the city's interior. The Vienna interior is a built architecture of home buried in the city's past. It is the city's inner secret, the deep currents hidden beneath its foundation. And it is also the interior space of the human self, discovered and mapped in the city. From around 1900, when it became the central Europe's magnet metropolis, to the present day, Vienna has inspired fateful dreams home. Its most famous denizens-Freud, Wittgenstein, Klimt, and many others-designed visionary interiors that formed the basis of the modern home. Part documentary, part imaginary journey, The Burning Child explores the dream of homemaking in the most and least homely city. Through interviews, testimony, and uncanny film footage, it presents the Vienna interior against the backdrop of Austria's repressed Nazi past, when homemaking, for Vienna's most ardent homemakers, met a catastrophic end.—Joseph Koerner
- Haunted by a painting of his grandparents seated in their living room, director Joseph Koerner returns to Vienna to unearth the remarkable story behind that vanished interior. He visits archivists, survivors, and renowned architects and artists who testify to the struggle for domestic belonging in their beautiful city.
The film explores Vienna's passion for the "modern" interiors-homes, bars, shops, sanatoria, and art galleries-that are the triumph of Viennese architects, including Otto Wagner, Joseph-Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos. It investigates the fantastical interiors created by Gustav Klimt and Sigmund Freud, which bring to light the dark recesses of the human soul. And it traces the political and social catastrophe brought about by the Anschluss, the 1938 annexation of Austria by Hitler and the systematic destruction of the homes and families of Viennese Jews, who sought safe haven in the city after centuries of persecution.
Capital city and nerve center of the vast multiethnic Habsburg Empire-Europe's largest after Russia-Vienna around 1900 became, famously, the hub of radical innovations in science, medicine, philosophy, and the arts. Birthplace of the modern in all these domains, Vienna posed a pressing question for all its inhabitants. Housing had always been in short supply, and with newcomers streaming in from all corners, problems of domicile became critical. Rich or poor, most everyone settled in rented apartments, making interior design-more than architecture-the great challenge of the day. Visiting outstanding interiors of the period, the film hears from architects and historians who, at work renovating these old spaces, conjure the hopes and desires of the city's past.
Interwoven with this history are personal tales: a dashing shoemaker-scion of Vienna's illustrious "imperial and royal" shoemaker-struggling to feel at home in his cobwebbed workshop; a holocaust survivor returned to the apartment stolen from her family by the Nazis; an eccentric artist creating an interior out sounds alone; and Joseph Koerner himself, troubled by an old portrait of his forefathers' Viennese domicile. The film visits these interiors as way stations along an uncanny voyage through one of the world's most-and least-homely city. Completed eighty years after the Anschluss, the film is moving and visually-stunning journey through Vienna's urban and psychic interior to a buried past, when dreams of home became, for a city's most ardent homemakers, an unimaginable nightmare.
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