Das Fest des Huhnes is a 1992 Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n film, directed by Walter Wippersberg. It is a production of the ORF

ORF (broadcaster)

Österreichischer Rundfunk, ORF, is the Austrian national public service broadcaster.Funded from a combination of a television licence fees and revenue from limited on-air advertising, ORF is the dominant player in the Austrian broadcast media...

 local studio in Oberösterreich, for the series "Kunst-Stücke" (Art-Works).

Plot

The morals and customs of the "native peoples" of Upper Austria

Upper Austria

Upper Austria is one of the nine states or Bundesländer of Austria. Its capital is Linz. Upper Austria borders on Germany and the Czech Republic, as well as on the other Austrian states of Lower Austria, Styria, and Salzburg...

 are described by a team of anthropologists

Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

 from Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa as a geographical term refers to the area of the African continent which lies south of the Sahara. A political definition of Sub-Saharan Africa, instead, covers all African countries which are fully or partially located south of the Sahara...

 in the style of Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an and American anthropologists in the non-western world

Western world

The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...

. While making the film, they discover new cultural phenomena. Wippersberg turns around the research methodology of Western anthropologists of performing ethnologic studies, and then popularising them by means of a documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

.

The name of the film derives from the discovery that the researchers made, that the churches were vacated, but the locals instead tend to gather in large tents, and drink a yellowish fluid

Beer

Beer is the world's most widely consumed andprobably oldest alcoholic beverage; it is the third most popular drink overall, after water and tea. It is produced by the brewing and fermentation of sugars, mainly derived from malted cereal grains, most commonly malted barley and malted wheat...

 by the litre, while primarily eating chicken

Chicken

The chicken is a domesticated fowl, a subspecies of the Red Junglefowl. As one of the most common and widespread domestic animals, and with a population of more than 24 billion in 2003, there are more chickens in the world than any other species of bird...

 and then engaging in a chicken dance

Chicken Dance

The "Chicken Dance" is an oom-pah song and its associated fad dance is now a contemporary American folk dance. The song was composed by accordion player Werner Thomas from Davos, Switzerland, in the 1950s....

. The researchers come to the conclusion that the chicken has taken the religious-sacrificial role of the lamb

Domestic sheep

Sheep are quadrupedal, ruminant mammals typically kept as livestock. Like all ruminants, sheep are members of the order Artiodactyla, the even-toed ungulates. Although the name "sheep" applies to many species in the genus Ovis, in everyday usage it almost always refers to Ovis aries...

.

Reviews

• The Austrian newspaper Der Standard
  Der Standard
  Der Standard is an Austrian national daily newspaper which is published in Vienna . It was founded by Oscar Bronner as a financial newspaper and the first edition was published on 1988-10-19...
  
   claims, "The film presents a wonderfully foreign view of Austrian life (in Upper Austria), with its distanced scientific perspective of an ethnologist. The sarcastic and perfectly developed counterpoint of picture and sound melts into an ironic unity." http://members.aon.at/wippersberg/huhn.html

• The Austrian newspaper Kurier
  Kurier
  The Kurier is an Austrian newspaper based in Vienna....
  
   claims, "Possibly the most original, meanest show broadcast by ORF in 1992; the parody of chauvinistic, interpret-everything expedition films, has reached cult status." http://members.aon.at/wippersberg/huhn.html

External links

• Das Fest des Huhnes in Internet Movie Database
  Internet Movie Database
  Internet Movie Database is an online database of information related to movies, television shows, actors, production crew personnel, video games and fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. It is one of the most popular online entertainment destinations, with over 100 million...
  
  
• Walter Wippersberg's home page