?Films, in their generic, stylistic, and rhetorical variety, are modes of experience that provide a sense for the unexpected dynamics of urban life and historical reality. This understanding of cinema, as loving as it is theoretical, inspired the writings on film which form a central part of the wide-ranging work of Austrian historian Siegfried Mattl. From the political imaginary of well-known "historical films" by Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, John Woo, and Todd Haynes, to inter-war comedies and post-war educational films highlighting the changing socio-economic textures of Vienna, and on...