ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the film Prater directed by Friedrich Kuplent. The experimental short Prater by Friedrich Kuplent can be considered as a pioneering work of Austrian avant-garde film and a city symphony. His film portrays Vienna through a day at the city's famous Prater fairground. His ambitious short begins with street impressions of Vienna, before focusing on the Prater, which is presented as a city within the city. Inherent parts of city life and the modern urban experience, amusement parks were a typical motif in city symphonies in the inter-war period. Kuplent deploys filmic tricks and experimental film techniques, including kaleidoscopic views, to give us an impression of the fairground's experiences and multitude of simultaneous thrills, translating them into the language of cinema. With its split-screen kaleidoscophic images, the film's climax shares some aesthetic similarities with the final sequence of Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera.
