Life is cold. The Austrian avant-garde and radical Ulrich Seidl made more than ten documentaries - and only two feature films. Moreover, the first of them, "Dog Heat", received the Grand Prix in Venice, and the second, a completely new "Import-Export", made no less noise (although it remained without awards) a year ago in Cannes. Now this shocking spectacle, most of which was filmed in Ukraine, has reached our screens. The New Times columnist not only watched the movie, but also talked to Seidl in Vienna and Cannes
Ulrich Seidl, without parting with his favorite monocle (a question not of style, but of poor eyesight), has been in the editing room of a small Viennese studio for the second year now, looking at storyboards and conjuring over gigantic footage. Looking up from the monitor for a second, he agrees to drink moonshine in honor of his own birthday, and then returns to work: no time for celebration. At this moment, he does not yet know that his "Import-Export" will represent Austria at the Cannes 2007 competition - a country whose cinema in the eyes of the whole world is limited to two names: Ulrich Seidl and Michael Haneke. Both skeptics and philosophers, heralds of a new, by no means sweet, style: naturalism on the verge of a foul, Austrian shock therapy.
Renegades
Unlike Haneke, Seidl is not a polyglot or cosmopolitan, he does not remake his own films in the States and does not stage Mozart at the Paris Opera.
The heroes of "Import-Export" are renegades. The first is the stupid youngster Pauli, who lost his job as a security guard and accompanies his stepfather on a trip from Vienna to Donetsk (they hope to sell slot machines in Ukraine that were written off as useless by the Austrians and thrown into the trash). The second is the Ukrainian nurse Olga, who tried to virtually sell herself via the Internet, and then went into exile to distant Vienna, where she manages to get a job as a cleaner in a nursing home.
Here is another refraction of the long-known story about East and West, which, however, does not bother Seidl: “I talk about Austria because it is my homeland, and not because it is hell on earth, which is so different from other European states ! he tells a columnist for The New Times. - Although I suspect that any statement that is fair in relation to Austria can also be applied to themselves by Germany, France or Italy. Where is the shock? It’s just that we are used to not noticing some aspects of life – for example, we don’t know anything about how lonely old people die in hospices.
Loneliness in a consumer society is what interests me. My task is to show the viewer his reflection and not let him turn away. It drives me crazy that Eastern European countries still see Western Europe as a role model. And the inhabitants of the same Austria live in blissful confidence, as if history had not known such a happy society as ours. We have to dispel some illusions. Actually, I've been doing this for fifteen years and I'm used to general discontent. Like, how can you shit in your own nest! Although after the Grand Prix in Venice, they began to treat me softer. The same, by the way, happened to Elfriede Jelinek after the Nobel Prize.”
temperature difference
Seidl's previous film "Heat of Dogs" is a feverish horror of everyday life that boils and melts at a temperature of +350 Celsius. It was in such conditions that the movie was filmed, this, on the contrary, in the cold. Import-Export is an icy picture in which everyday hopelessness freezes all emotions: this applies to both the characters and the audience. The further, the more unbearable. Pauli makes her way through the cruel Ukrainian blizzards, Olga tries to warm with her body a cooling old man who has only a few hours left to live. There is no happy ending, not even a tragic denouement: only the last, final cold of the final film, endlessly repeated (to make sure it came) the word tod - “death”. Then the viewer comes to his senses for a long time. Warms up.
“Believe me, I did not order a temperature of -300 and could not foresee it! says Seidl. - I was told that during the period of our filming, the most brutal cold fell in the last thirty years. But I needed to shoot in the winter, on location. When I think about Eastern Europe, I imagine winter. For me, it is fundamentally important to make a movie not in the built scenery, but in conditions close to reality, and on location. Initially, by the way, we thought about Romania, we were even helped with the choice of extras and filming locations by Cristian Mungiu, the future favorite of Cannes. And then I decided that Ukraine allows you to show a sharper contrast with prosperous Austria. I traveled all over the country, talked to people in small mining towns, and I hope I understood a lot of what I was able to show in the film. No, I know that Ukraine is full of nouveau riches, their life is very prosperous, but these aspects did not interest me ... "
The gravedigger of idealism
Ulrich, the hero of the best Austrian novel of the 20th century, Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, contrasted the sense of reality with the sense of possibility. Seidl, a gravedigger of idealism, although a born humanist, returns to a sense of reality. If anyone can be called a true realist in cinema today, it is only him. It's not about the instinct of a documentary filmmaker and non-professional artists. Seidl's metaphors, his songs of loneliness and restlessness, grow out of a frighteningly recognizable texture and therefore act as the most graphic of all possible agitations. Seeing a condensed reality in which man is not even a wolf to man, but something like furniture, the viewer will feel the very compassion that the ordinary heroes of Seidl's films are completely deprived of. This is a necessary and desired effect: to see real people on the screen and, at least for a moment, to feel themselves as real people.
“It's not about my love of experimentation or experience as a documentary filmmaker. It was just important for me to find people who experienced the same thing as their characters. In the case of the Austrian boy, unemployment and idleness. In the case of a girl from Ukraine - poverty and complete ignorance of everything related to the foundations of European life. I found these qualities in Paul Hoffmann and Catherine Rak.
Do not think that, bringing cinema closer to reality, I seriously believe that the film can change the world or the political situation - alas, no matter how much I dream about it ... In this sense, I am an inveterate pessimist. However, cinema can make a person change his mind. And even push him to act.
Filmography of Ulrich Seidl Import-export Austria, 2007 Dog heat Austria, 2001
