There
is a heck of a lot of National Socialist gold still out there. Some is safely
tucked away in Swiss vaults, but there is one wayward shipment rather
tantalizingly lying at the bottom of Lake Atter (a.k.a. the Attersee). An
American fleeing boobsie Arkansas will be recruited into a scheme to salvage
that gold in Tav Falco’s first feature-length film, Urania Descending (trailer here), which screens this Thursday as part of a
night of the Panther Burns front man’s film at the Anthology Film Archives.
Title
cards warn us not to expect perfectly synchronized audio, but frankly there
will not be a lot of dialogue to worry about. Not exactly found footage, Descending claims to be the mysterious
16mm reels of an unknown outsider-artist filmmaker, cobbled together as well as
possible. Although there is a bit of talking here and there, Falco is clearly engaging
with the conventions and motifs of silent cinema—much more so than the caper
movie.
Fed
up with leering lowlifes, Gina Lee just up and bought a one-way ticket to
Vienna. How long can she afford to idle away her days in merry old Vienna?
Maybe for quite a while, if she can complete the job offered to her by
tango-dancing playboy Diego Moritz. Her job will be to romance Karl-Heinz Von
Riegl, the son of the German officer in charge of the gold shipment that
crashed in Lake Atter. It will not be difficult to get him talking about it,
but snapping a picture of the pertinent map will be a trickier task.
That
probably makes it sound like intrigue abounds in Descending, but frankly there are almost no twists or turns to this
sixty-nine minute tale. Instead, Falco is much more interested in realizing the
film’s neo-retro look. Think of it as a more animated cousin of Sally Potter’s Thriller, or a less grungy, modern day Alphaville. Indeed, Descending could pass for Godard’s remake of a John Huston caper
film, produced by the Warhol factory.
