Rebirth of the radical at the Viennale film festival

As a regular film festival-goer, I often find myself asking: "What is a film festival for?" The replies vary depending on whether one is a film-maker, critic or member of the public. Film-makers may answer that it gives them an opportunity to schmooze producers, distributors and critics, while allowing their films to get some exposure. Critics and film-goers may say it gives them the chance to see the latest movies before anyone else in their country. Alas, the biggest draws at a festival are usually films that will most likely be shown sooner or later at the local multiplex.

Not so at the Viennale festival, where even the most non-commercial films play to full houses. Strictly non-red carpet, the Viennale provides reassurance that radical, experimental cinema is still a going concern. If the prime purpose of a film festival is to open up exciting new vistas and present work one is unlikely to see elsewhere, then Vienna in autumn is the place to be.

This year, audiences were able to catch up on 10 films by the prolific Lino Brocka, the Philippines' most celebrated director, killed in a car crash in 1991 aged 52. And where else could one see a retrospective of the films of the extraordinary character actor Timothy Carey, who also directed a groundbreaking underground film, The World's Greatest Sinner (1962)? Other stimulating retrospectives were a 12-film tribute to Tilda Swinton, including cinema theorist Peter Wollen's only feature, Friendship's Death (1987); a series entitled The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the USA, and early Austrian films from 1906-18.

The tone of the festival was set with the trailer by James Benning. Last year's was a hard act to follow, commissioned as it was from Jean-Luc Godard, but Benning's Fire and Rain (after the James Taylor song) was a success. It consists of a 50-second shot of work in a steel factory – which is in fact a tiny fragment from a two-hour take from Benning's new film, Ruhr. It was Benning who made 13 Lakes (2004), 130 minutes of 13 stationary takes of North American lakes, and RR (2007), comprising nearly two hours of trains passing through our field of vision - ie, that of his tripod-mounted, never-moving camera. If the word "boring" comes into your mind, then you don't really know Benning's work, or you are unwilling to commit to such levels of concentration and engagement necessary to gain the untold rewards this kind of contemplative cinema offers. Nobody pretends experimental cinema is easy watching. Some boredom, incomprehension and irritation is part of the price one pays to be equally surprised, exhilarated and inspired.

Among the examples of "minimalist" cinema on display in Vienna was Peter Liechti's The Sound of Insects – Record of a Mummy, based on the diary of a man who meticulously recorded the last weeks of his life while starving himself to death in a remote area. We hear a voice reading the diary and see nothing outside his vision and hallucinations, which forces the viewer to share his experience.

Jean-Marie Straub's Corneille and Brecht – a world premiere – consists of three almost identical sections in which a woman declaims verses of Corneille on ancient Rome and then sits in an armchair reading from Brecht's radio play The Trial of Lucullus. It is rather like listening to an opera in an unknown language, stretching your understanding beyond mere sense and content, and much of the hypnotic effect comes from the unexpected cuts – such as the way the reader's clothes keep changing.

The Anchorage, co-directed by the Swedish photographer Anders Edström and the American CW Winter, demonstrates the drama of banality. The film follows the everyday existence of an elderly woman who lives alone on an island on the Stockholm archipelago. She swims in the cold sea, goes shopping, catches fish and listens to the radio. Yet every action is significant in its own way due to the way the film is shot and the sound design. While eschewing any large themes, it is a cinematic poem to nature and survival.

In contrast were two new Austrian productions the festival was obliged to show. Unfortunately, each proved the banality of drama. Domaine, a rather unpleasant French-Austrian co-production by Patric Chiha, tried to be serious about trivial people, but turned out to be trivial about trivial people. Nevertheless, it was helped by an unnerving performance by Béatrice Dalle as an alcoholic woman jealous of her gay nephew (a promising debut by Isaïe Sultan).

Another actor who has seen better days is Helmut Berger, Visconti's prima uomo, but he gives a sympathetic performance in the unspeakable Blutsfreundschaft (Initiation), directed by the veteran Peter Kern, who acted in several Fassbinder movies. Set in a Vienna that nobody could recognise, it deals with a group of Nazi thugs who terrorise "non-pure Austrians" and "homos". One of their targets is the self-styled "old faggot" Berger, who has befriended a reluctant Nazi boy (who reminds him of the boy he loved when he was in the Hitler Youth – cut to exploitative flashbacks.) The ludicrous finale shows a group of immigrants – Turks, Orientals, Arabs – lining up in front of a large group of Nazi yobs on the march. The yobs stop, drop their banners and turn on their heels. If only.

What a relief to leave maximalism and return to films where nothing much seems to happen but where everything happens.