Die Weltmaschine (1981)

Annaliese Psiko is married to an unsuccessful painter who is constantly drunk. He made his living painting backgrounds for other artists’ pictures. But since his alcoholism left him unable to do so, Annaliese has been painting the backgrounds, though she has no artistic ambitions of her own. When her husband suddenly dies, Annaliese turns down an offer to move in with her daughter and her family. Instead, she wants to travel to “where she was once happy”: the farm of a Styrian farmer who spent 25 years building the World Machine, a mechanical work of art made up of countless colorful, moving, glowing parts, until his death. On the way, she meets Franz, an art expert who is campaigning to keep the machine where it is. The farmer’s son wants to sell it to a museum in Germany. Although the machine is actually broken, it mysteriously begins to move in Annaliese’s presence. This has happened only once before, with Fürchtegott Trauschein, the village schoolteacher, who suddenly disappeared one day and was said to have killed himself. According to Franz, Fürchtegott wanted to “get inside the system,” and only now does it become clear what he meant: Fürchtegott has somehow become part of the machine and lives on inside it. A hose that spits out little notes in Annaliese’s presence allows him to communicate with her, and he asks her to make sure the machine is preserved: he would die if it were dismantled. Annaliese comes up with a plan to raise money to preserve the machine, with help from her two lodgers, both prostitutes. The two attend a high-society party at the home of Professor Gans, a wealthy and successful painter and one of the main buyers of Annaliese’s painted backgrounds. They steal four of his paintings from the walls, and Annaliese smuggles them to New York, rolled up and wrapped in paintings of her own. There, she hopes to sell them to a famous art dealer. He has no interest in Gans’s paintings, saying they are “passé” and could not be sold in New York. But he much prefers Annaliese’s own abstract, monochrome paintings, which she had actually brought only to wrap Gans’s pictures in. He offers Annaliese a solo exhibition, for which she paints more pictures. She becomes something of a shooting star in New York’s art scene and sells every painting at the opening. She returns to the World Machine, and the proceeds from the paintings make it possible to prevent its sale to Germany. All this time, Annaliese has not been in touch with her daughter and son-in-law. They have no understanding of her artistic lifestyle, consider her mentally confused, and have called the police. When the police track her down and the whole family arrives at the farm, Annaliese decides, as Fürchtegott Trauschein did before her, to disappear into the machine.