Page - 120 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

120 siting futurity Freud but a central core of the psycho-geography that is Vien- nese cinema” (ibid., 72). As we saw in this study’s introduction, this understanding of Viennese cinema is often conflated with that of the new Austrian cinema and that cinema’s feel-bad ten- dency to transcend the specificity of historically practiced space to produce “non-places,” that is, places from which protagonists have been cut off and in which they cannot meaningfully locate themselves (Dassanowsky and Speck 2011, 3). In searching out the filming location of The Grand Budapest Hotel, namely the city of Görlitz, Germany, near the confluence of the German, Polish, and Czech borders, and discovering how, like Detroit, Michigan, it is currently struggling to reinvent itself in the age of global finance capitalism by using cultural production as a mo- tor to spark local prosperity, this chapter reveals the grand ho- tel of Anderson’s title to indeed be a non-place but befitting the auteur sensibilities Anderson shares with fellow Texan, Richard Linklater, not one of the usual sort.1 The Grand Budapest Hotel traps its protagonists, and also the audiences that identify with them, in a particular attitude towards the past, with implica- tions for both present and future. Like insects caught in amber or “trapped within the airless interior spaces of a doll’s-house” (Firebrace 2014, 73), they become fixated on a melancholic re- lation of loss.2 However, as we saw in the previous chapter on Christoph Schlingensief’s dealings with Vienna and Austria, the 1 Donna Kornhaber, who approaches Anderson as “an expat member” of “an Austin filmmaking community committed to the idiosyncratic vision of the writer-director, figures who are as deeply immersed in exploring and refashioning film history as they are insistent on remaining independ- ent of Hollywood trends” which is to say, “indebted not to the outward trappings of Texas identity but to the pioneering spirit it is meant to embody” (2018, 126). 2 This world and its affective coordinates are similar to those of much of the New German Cinema, as diagnosed by Thomas Elsaesser: “[d]rawing on Freud’s essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (‘Trauer und Melancholie’, 1917) and its analysis of ‘parapraxis,’ Elsaesser suggests that the world reflected in much of the New German Cinema was caught in an ultimately self- destructive loop of melancholic repetition, in which the films’ protagonists were invariably able only to perform the failure of the nation to mourn its past, a process of mourning which is necessary for a true comprehension