«It Really Was Like That» – Austria in the Cinema of Memory and Legitimation

Abstract

This dissertation examines the development of state film funding in Austria from 1955 to the period of European integration as a process of transformation within the cultural field. It focuses on how forms of collective identification were produced, stabilized, and transformed through state-supported film production, and what function this symbolic production fulfilled in the process of political legitimation.
Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field and the state, film funding is not understood merely as an instrument of cultural policy or economic support, but as a structure of selective decisions that determines which projects are realized and which forms of cinematic representation are considered legitimate. The analysis therefore concentrates on the symbolic forms through which belonging, national self-descriptions, and interpretations of the past are articulated in film and institutionally supported.
The study is based on extensive archival material, including funding guidelines, project applications, ministerial correspondence, and internal decision-making processes. This is complemented by an analysis of the funded films themselves in order to trace changes in narrative and aesthetic forms of collective identification over time.
Particular attention is paid to the autonomization of Austrian cinema. While film production in the postwar period was primarily regarded as an economic factor and export product, the period under study reveals a gradual recognition of cinema as an autonomous artistic field. This process, which has not yet been systematically analyzed, is reconstructed as the outcome of institutional and symbolic struggles.
By combining the analysis of cultural policy, institutional structures, and symbolic production, the dissertation contributes to understanding how state-funded culture participates in the production and stabilization of legitimate forms of belonging in postwar Austria.

Short biography

Andrey Gordov is a doctoral researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He studied political science at the University of Vienna, focusing on identity politics, collective memory, and visual politics. During his bachelor’s and master’s studies, he explored questions of identity and memory, and his master’s thesis examined the visual framing of contemporary documentary films on climate change.
He is currently working on his doctoral project on state-funded Austrian postwar cinema up to EU accession, investigating how films, through institutional funding, shaped identity politics, the autonomization of cinema as an artistic field, and the exercise of symbolic power. His research combines archival work with film analysis to understand how cultural production and symbolic forms of belonging are created and maintained.