FILM SCREENINGS

Lemmings - Part 1 - Arcadia

1979. Austria. Directed by Michael Haneke. Screenplay by Haneke. With Regina Sattler, Christian Ingomar. Set in 1959 in Wiener Neustadt, the provincial city of Haneke's adolescent years, Lemmings - Part 1 is a dramatic and withering portrait of Austria's second "lost generation": teenagers who grew up in monstrously repressive bourgeois families, forbidden to speak of wartime collaboration and defeat, indoctrinated with an unquestioning obedience to family, state, and God, and taught that kindness is weakness and their own sexuality is shameful and abject. Contemptuous of their parents' impotence and hypocrisy, they rebel in destructive and self-destructive ways. In German; English subtitles. 113 min.