Page - 168 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

168 siting futurity age of painters in the village of Dafen, near Shenzhen, which is famed for producing copies of oil paintings,9 and of a couple on a motorcycle driving around Boluo so that viewers can form an impression of the extent of the construction in the surrounding area. As Eli Horwatt commented after the showing at the 2015 Hot Docs in Toronto, the film “offers an unusual mirror to the West through the lens of contemporary China” (Raidel n.d.). That mirror is deliberately disorienting. In the opening sec- tion in Austria, which is shot through with cuts to China, Raidel encourages the development of viewers’ perceptive abilities by repeatedly challenging them to evaluate what it is they think they are seeing. Chinese women are shown wearing Austrian folkloric dress — are they in Austria or in China? In an inter- view, the owner of the Grüner Baum hotel, Monika Wenger, boasts that after she learned of her hotel’s duplication, she had her establishment renovated and that all of the interior furnish- ings were made in China and shipped to Austria in four con- tainers. When we are then shown the hotel’s reception, we see that the reception sign is in German and Chinese — are we still in Austria, or has the documentary once again cut to China? We have already seen a young Chinese boy playing in the fountain in Hallstatt’s main market square that has turned out to be in China, as there are bright-orange fish in the fountain. We also see Chinese lanterns in a waterside restaurant full of Chinese patrons that those who know the original would recognize is in Austria. There is then another abrupt cut to the back of a man looking out to a huge working harbour. That we are now decidedly no longer in Austria is confirmed with a street market scene of people wearing straw hats cleaning fish. Because Hallstatt is such a small place with very recogniz- able sites, viewers find themselves noting differences among the 9 Raidel’s inclusion of Dafen and not a karaoke bar, which would have served equally well to draw attention to the skill that copying requires but is not specific to southern China, is in keeping with her overall agenda of explaining to Euro-American “Westerners” how Hallstatt came to be copied and where and how it fits into the Chinese scene.