It is edifying that the long-neglected subject of Austrian cinema has become the growing subject of serious examination in Austria and abroad due to the global focus on New Austrian Film. This has also stimulated analysis in Austrian film's relationships with other national cinemas and its special history with Hollywood. Franz Grafl's study of this rather new subject is a solidly researched, theoretically based international examination that builds a collective image: “To a far greater extent than the local movie … the non-German-language film becomes the cultural ambassador of Austria. What image can future generations make of us with the help of these images and sounds told in different film styles, fates, and events?” (11).

Grafl's methodologies rest not only on the diplomatic, journalistic, and literary influences of the Austrian image but also on deconstruction, reception theory, paratextuality, genre/subgenre codes, the “‘Innersten,’ aus dem Detail heraus, gesehen” (“Innermost,” seen from the detail) (17), and its interplay with symbolic values found in Lermolieff's fin-de-siècle examinations of Italian master paintings, along with theoretical tools from the writings of Freud, Barthes, Deleuze, Kristeva, Durand, Pasolini, and others. The author correctly points to the fact that not only is this area of examination something akin to a terra incognita but so are the creation of his theoretical instruments that inspect cinema's narrative modes to register the mentalities of the filmmakers, the characters, and the contemporary spectators. Grafl does a superlative job in attempting to filter more than a century's worth of images through his theoretical grids.

World War I is the inception of the Austrian image in early world film, and while there are Allied propaganda narratives that demonize as they do the German image of “The Hun,” it is apparent that Austria did not have a lingering image of barbarism because anti-Austrian images were “ethnically” less specific and rarer. The films from the United States, Italy, and France that survive relativize the qualities of the “bad” Austrian as degenerate and weak in morals and even in patriotism, rather than denote them as blood-thirsty nationalists in narratives that were violent in a more universal manner. For example, in Maciste alpino/The Warrior (Italy, 1916), the Italian hero's vicious brutality against nearly faceless Austrian soldiers was protested by the Italian censors. In the case of Song of Hate (US, 1915), the makers strove for artistic value, basing the narrative on Puccini's Tosca and focused far more on the heroics of the Allied character. This meant there would be no postwar cinematic monument such as Hollywood's treatment of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), which attempted a sympathetic examination of the dehumanized German soldier, but there was a strong example of Austrian pacifism in Die Waffen nieder!/Lay Down Your Arms (Denmark, 1914) at the start of the war, which was based on the text by Nobel Peace Prize–winning Austro-Hungarian author Bertha von Suttner.

While the interwar image of Austrians and postimperial Austria mostly revolved around period pieces that ranged from satirical melodrama of Austrian émigré Erich von Stroheim to Ruritanian fantasy (many influenced by translations of Arthur Schnitzler), Grafl underscores that the first wave of postwar Austrian images in Hollywood and international film related to war loss: poor immigrants, impoverished nobility, and the trope of the traumatized woman who attempts to survive the destruction of her honor. Grafl painstakingly reconstructs such a symbolic treatment of “Austria” in the Austro-Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg's lost film, The Case of Lena Smith/Eine Nacht im Prater/Le Calvaire de Lina X (US, 1930) from elements of contemporary reception. Ironically this sound film found itself in global box office competition to René Clair's Sous les toits de Paris/Unter den Dächern von Paris (France, 1930), which became the most significant influence on Austrian auteurs Willi Forst and Walter Reisch's “Wiener Film” genre that marketed Vienna both past and present in a poetic-realist style that became synonymous with the internationally popular Austrian film (and its Hollywood remakes) throughout the 1930 and into the 1940s.

Von Stroheim first formulates general postwar cinema consciousness about Austrians as war agents or déclassé aristocrats and reintroduces the mythic quality of Vienna linked to its imperial past as a grand city and one of erotic adventures in his two films, Merry-Go-Round (1923) and The Wedding March (1928), while The Merry Widow (1924), adapted from the Franz Lehar's operetta, launched the image of Vienna as “Operettenstaat.” According to Grafl, the additional mythology for cinematic Vienna comes from such films as The Blue Danube (US, 1928), which resorts to the reductive Bürgerliches Trauerspiel formula in which the woman is poor but sweet and the suitor wealthy and aristocratic, and love does not survive the decadence of Vienna. On the other end of the spectrum, Ernst Lubitsch, the German émigré director who would shape American social-satirical films of the 1930s and mentor Billy Wilder, presents a “Vienna, [as] still the city of laughter and light romance” (44) in The Marriage Circle (US, 1924).

One of Grafl's noteworthy examinations en détail is of the forgotten film, Surrender (US, 1928), a rare film set in the Habsburg era that plays in a frontier village rather than in Vienna, and that is also remarkable for presenting the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as a benevolent, protective entity, positioned against antisemitism, and with a loyal Jewish population. When Russian Cossacks attack a Jewish village in Galicia (Austro-Poland), Austrian troops save the village, and the central story of love and bitter betrayal involving a rabbi's daughter resolves itself melodramatically. The author balances this with an equally impressive analysis of early sound film return to the image of the Austrian spy and Vienna as the hotbed of espionage. Here he takes on the innovation of the “Überblendungstechnik” and the tragic antiwar qualities of von Sternberg's vehicle for Marlene Dietrich as Austrian agent X27 in Dishonored/Entehrt (US, 1931) along with other films that present the (Austrian) female ready to sacrifice herself for a greater cause.

By the mid-1930s, the Italians, Americans, and British filmmakers were all influenced by the Wiener Film and its poetic-realist blend of narrative and music. They also borrowed heavily from the concept of the Viennese operetta. An example is The Smiling Lieutenant (US, 1931), although it was Germany that remade the most Viennese operettas as films after 1933 in an unspoken declaration that this musical genre was in fact an aspect of German genius. In the United States, the flood of waltz music saturated Vienna in so many films it prompted one critic to utter: “The spectator in Berlin and Paris, in London and New York leaves the cinema under an impression that Vienna, Vienna alone must be a paradise.—This nuisance must come to an end” (79). And it did not come to an end even after Austria disappeared from the maps in 1938. Certainly not in Hollywood, where Freud-like doctors seemed to appear in nearly every other film. Grafl points out there were hardly any films that dealt with the Anschluss, and the screwball comedy about a social climbing dancer (Ginger Rogers) and a reporter (Cary Grant) following her Austrian Nazi agent husband, the devious Baron von Luber (Walter Slezak), as he initiates Hitler's dirty work across the map of Europe in Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942) was the misfire of the year. Grafl fails to mention that, despite its absurdity, it is the first American film to present the Nazi sterilization program and a concentration camp filled with Orthodox Jewish prisoners. Instead, the Vienna of the MGM backlot was the more audience pleasing one in a fictional and genre-expanding musical biopic of Johann Strauss, The Great Waltz (1939).

Habsburg history and opulent royalist fantasy remain strong representations of “Austria” from the 1930s to the 1960s in the United States and Western Europe, while the more common, multicultural life in the borderlands of the monarchy captivates directors from Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the 1950s and 1960s. Vienna most famously appears without waltzes and in the occupied ruins of Carol Reed's The Third Man (UK, 1949) and in George Sidney's The Red Danube (UK, 1949), which reintroduces the spy trope from the 1920s that ultimately culminates sixty years later with Vienna as a touristic decoration for the James Bond film, The Living Daylights (US/UK, 1987). The vague non-German identity of Austrians in English-language films is not the case in other international productions, particularly those by the Italians, which presents the Austrian as a recognizable Other vis-à-vis the German. Rossellini's Austrian deserter in Roma città aperta/Rome, Open City (1944) might have been examined here as the root of Italy's more nuanced postwar filmic construction of the Austrian.

Grafl takes on two films of similar late Hollywood studio style that deal with the disappearance of Austria in 1938 and its reappearance in 1945, which became international hits and functioned as a reintroduction of the Austrian and a touristic Austria: an uncommon Disney “war” film, The Miracle of the White Stallions (1963), which not only reintroduces the Lipizzan stallions to the world but also posits the individual struggle of stepping out of German uniforms in 1945. The other is the redoubtable Sound of Music (1965; erroneously credited to Disney) based on a German film of 1956 and a Broadway musical, in which aristocracy, high culture, and Catholicism come into functional play as codes of national identification. The hardships of the 1930s are ignored, the Anschluss is turned into a family tragedy, and song is the promise of survival. Yet for all the charges of Hollywood co-opting of the Austrian Heimatfilm, the Nazis are all Austrians, something that would have been impossible in an Austrian film of the same era.

With the 1990s and 2000s, the Austrian image in global film became less romanticized and many of the clichés fall. This is concurrent with the nation's own delayed coming to terms with the Nazi past, its more solid presence on the international stage as a European Union member state, and the inception of its long-awaited new wave—the New Austrian Film. Grafl points to such national and coproductions as Before Sunrise (US, 1995), Jadvigas Parnaja/Jadviga's Pillow (Hungary, 2000), Klimt (France, Germany, UK, 2006), and A Dangerous Method (UK, 2011) as new, more critical attempts of comprehending the Austrian experience, which nevertheless manage to provide ironic reflections on the traditional cinematic vocabulary and mythos.

Grafl's text is structured chronologically, for the most part, with particular years and eras serving as main chapters, but these are interspersed with chapters on specific aspects of genre, style, technology, design, topoi, gender images, and so on. While it is not suggested that this is a handy or even complete Nachschlagswerk, the text's structure makes for very fulfilling exploration of its topics, which are introduced, dissected, reassembled, and revised throughout the history of cinema. Franz Grafl's Imaginiertes Österreich is a highly unique and important addition to the new scholarship on cinema's relationship with Austria and its influence on a wide and variant international plane. It is an essential book for Austrian and cinema studies and, with its fascinating current of vibrant theory ranging from close reading to semiotics and intertextuality, is a resource that will be useful in historical, cultural, and gender studies as well.