Arena

Around the Arena, summer and early autumn 1976: a youth and countercultural left occupies the event site in St. Marx – no pun intended, that is really the name of that area in Vienna. The sequence of images in Schmidt Jr.'s silent documentary is brisk, but it allows for impressionistic approaches to the events. First, there is a night-time demonstration in Vienna's city centre for the preservation of the former "Auslands-Schlachthof" (foreign slaughterhouse) site that had been used by the yearly Wiener Festwochen festival under the series title Arena, then occupied in 1976, but slated for demolition and transfer to a textile company by the Vienna municipal authorities. This part of the film ends with the banner slogan "Schafft zwei, drei... viele Arenas" ("Create two, three... many arenas", paraphrasing a Che Guevara quote on the anti-imperialist role of Vietnam). Political inscriptions, this time on walls, are also traced in the second part of the film, which is as pan-happy as the first, but longer, sunlit, taking place on the occupied Arena grounds. The written slogans range from "Venceremos" and "Tod den Bullen" ("Death to the Cops") to "Kämpfe Zimbabwe" ("Fight Zimbabwe") and "Habt keinen Kadaver im Mund – Sprecht mit den Zähnen!" ("Don't have a cadaver in your mouth – Speak with your teeth!"). We are deep within Schmidt Jr.´s cinema here: The world is writing, and in between, bodies romp about in play, in everyday life, politicised on these premises by their mere presence – even if the long-haired men and shorter-haired women (some wearing cowgirl hats) are only playing football, chatting, smoking, grinning at each other or at the camera.

P.S. Short sections of the Arena material filmed on site were included in Schmidt Jr.'s Wienfilm 1896-1976, quasi as illustration/punctuation for a political narrative: the children Sheila and Brendan Kronheim tell the story of the demolition and appropriation of this occupied piece of urban space by corporate capital. (Drehli Robnik)