Artischocke

Although he spent a relatively short period of his life in Austria, Canadian-born John Cook (1935–2001) remained, in his own words, "Viennese by choice.” Having worked as a commercial photographer in Paris, Cook’s […] first “regular” production was Schwitzkasten, based on a novel by the leftist writer Helmut Zenker. Today, the film is considered one of the few undisputed masterpieces of the New Austrian Cinema: a freewheeling, tender, and strangely humorous portrait of working-class (and out-of-work) lives.

A man visits a friend's house. They watch a film of an earlier time when they were hanging around, meeting girls.

In Canadian-born John Cook’s restless documentary of an Austrian couple, I JUST CAN’T GO ON, the husband Petrus, channeling “Cassius Marcellus Clay,” takes up boxing to supplement the income from his day-job burnishing frames. His companion, the much older Gisi, works as a janitor. They are an odd couple, scavenging at the bottom of the Viennese social ladder. But there is nothing patronizing or exploitative in Cook’s treatment of the couple and their eccentricities as they try to make ends meet. In one of the film’s key aesthetic choices, Cook eschews synched sound in favor of a stream-of-consciousness soundtrack pitting Petrus and Gisi’s unfiltered remarks in relief against the harsh material world.