Happiness

Happiness is pursued as a self-portrait, according to the title addition, in the light of the Vienna (Wurstel-)Prater, the amusement park that Ernst Schmidt Jr.'s cinema repeatedly visits. A half-minute fast-paced montage in colour, including classic gender-normative icons of petty bourgeois happiness: a girl in a white dress, suggesting a Catholic first communion (with a visit to the Prater, as it was once a tradition in Vienna); Daisy and Donald Duck and the latter's three nephews on a display; the (now museumised) Watschenmann, literally "slap-man", a strength-measuring device on which people – well, men – could try their luck and the strength of their frustration-fuelled fists. But the happiness is only made perfect by the dissolution of these icons into graphically dynamic patterns, into blurs and into the simple colourism of painted wooden boards. (Drehli Robnik)