The Most Austrian Film Director. Notes on the Cinema of Willi Forst

The present essay will discuss the work of Austrian film director Willi Forst. Active in Austria and Germany from the early 1930s to the end of the 1950s, Forst has been commonly regarded as one of the great names in the history of German-speaking cinema. In discussing the influence of Austria’s culture on Forst’s work, this essay will seek for an element of Forst’s affinity for it in the aesthetics and ideology which informed Forst’s oeuvre.