Ordinary Folk Life in Vienna

Wiener Kunstfilm, the first major Austrian film production company, was founded in 1910 by the photographer Anton (Gustav) Kolm, his wife Luise Kolm-Veltée, and the cameraman Jacob Fleck to counter France’s domination of the Austro-Hungarian cinema market. This emblematic short film is an August Sander-like portrait of “ordinary folk life in Vienna” – radically different from the one depicted nearly a century later in Ulrich Seidl’s Good News.