Page - 61 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

61 conVerting Kebab and currency into community that discourse. The conflict in culture-clash films is brought about by a “foreign” culture’s presence in the “home” culture, where it does not belong, is clearly not welcome and causes problems. While what leads to the specific conflict is overcome by the end of each film and there is a “happy end,” which for the filmmakers is a means of demonstrating how to overcome the clashes they see happening around them, the reconcilia- tions their films reach can only ever be temporary because the ongoing presence of the culture whose fundamental differences are blamed for causing conflicts is never accepted as being part of the mix of the “home” culture. The plot of each Kebab film revolves around a conflict symbolized by an animal gift to the Turkish family (a lamb and a donkey to be ritually slaughtered), and the weakness of the second film comes to the fore in the dis- appearance of the donkey from the plot. This type of construc- tion has practical advantages in that it leads to the possibility of serial development. While no sequel has yet been made of Die Freischwimmerin, the reconciliation of its ending — a successful swim meet in which the team wins a silver — could as easily be disturbed by a new conflict or threat as was introduced in Kebab extra scharf! with the arrival of the Turkish patriarch insisting on his grandson’s circumcision. The genre of culture-clash comedy is neither new nor re- stricted to Austria. Rather, it tends to feature in countries when minority populations achieve mainstream success that is experi- enced by locals as threatening, a dynamic masterfully given ex- pression in the character of Kebab mit Alles’s coffeeshop owner. The purpose of such films is, as Reika Ebert and Ann Beck point out in their reading of Kebab Connection (2004, dir. Anno Saul), to offer “social pathways that promote multiculturalism in con- temporary” society (Ebert and Beck 2007, 87).4 4 In Britain one saw this with films such as East Is East (1999, dir. Damien O’Donnell) and Bend It Like Beckham (2002, dir. Gurinder Chadha), while in the recent Green Book (2018, dir. Peter Farrelly), there is an at- tempt to promote racial tolerance in contemporary America by locating race problems in the past. Its portrayal of a growing friendship between an African-American classical and jazz pianist and his Italian-American