Sceny narciarskie z Franzem Klammerem (Scènes de ski avec Franz Klammer)

A portrait of an Austrian skier-celebrity of the late seventies, Franz Klammer. Lumberjack scenes, images of big falls, leaping in the air in an opera house, diving: it’s a formally constructed work that departs from most norms of documentary cinema. Every scene in the film is artificial and staged and the film points comically to its own production in a burlesque scene of various takes of filming Franz Klammer on the snow. The whole film plays on the kitsch aspects of Austrian culture and concentrates less on trying to present a coherent reality than on the iconography surrounding the figure of Franz Klammer, which becomes nonetheless a highly expressive and idiosyncratic allegory.