sparta (w&d ulrich seidl, w. veronika franz)

Having now seen three of his films, it seems to fair to make the call that Ulrich Seidl is one of the most transgressive directors at work, making movies that others wouldn’t dare to. Sparta is no exception. There are scenes in the film which are as transgressive in modern western society as almost anything you can get away with. To have as your protagonist a pedophile is obviously a bold step, but to then have him wander round naked in the showers as his prey (or are they) frolic in their trunks is to take it one stage further. Having said which, perhaps the most transgressive thing Sparta does is seek to humanise Ewald, the wealthy man-child at the film’s heart. The film shows us Ewald embracing his inner child on the swings, joining a snowball fight, identifying more with the children than the adults, a kind of Wordsworthian monster, before he gets to open his Sparta academy where he grooms one young boy in particular. At the same time, the Sparta he creates is a kind of haven for the boys, a place where they can act out their childish games, play at being gladiators, scream and holler as much as they like. The dark turn we keep expecting the film to take is only ever insinuated at; if it happens it is never disclosed. Perhaps Ewald, caught up in the shadow of his senile Nazi father, is just a harmless fantasist? Or perhaps not. At the same time, it seems relevant that Ewald preys on Romanian children, which could be a metaphor for the way that the rich prey on the weak, or could be a more direct commentary on the expansionist economics of Germany and Austria, a hangover of other expansionist policies who the senile father embodies. Seidl’s film might have been accused of being exploitative, were it not for its disciplined edit and rigorous cinematography. The framing by Wolfgang Thaler is always thought provoking: an interplay of architecture, image and sensation. The edit breaks the dramatic tension as much as ramping it up. The film succeeds in being both deadening and dramatically tense at the same time, a curious and admirable achievement, which might be said to reflect the modern condition. 

safari (d ulrich seidl)

Seidl’s deadpan, disturbing documentary is a fearsome piece of stripped-down filmmaking. As the title suggests, the film follows various  Austrian characters on safari at a game reserve in Namibia. The reserve is run by a German couple whose visitors include a family of four, father, mother, son and daughter. It’s obvious that these people are extremely wealthy. Safaris aren’t something many can afford, as one of the hunters observes, stating they bring far more money into the country than ordinary tourists.  

The film is set up to intersperse moments of action, as the hunters track down game in the bush, with snippets from staged interviews, where they talk about their attitudes to hunting, killing and death. Those characters seem harmless enough on first viewing; their attitudes appear to be formed by a need to prove their alpha status, for example when the son questions his sister as to why she’d draw the line at killing a lion or a giraffe. They come across as banal figures, playing out some kind of power fantasy as they tramp through the bush, searching out targets. Another older couple are even broadly comic, with the wife spending her time sun-bathing whilst her husband drinks beer in a hide, waiting for game that never arrives.

But in the last third of the film the killing takes on a different dimension. The mother has already shot an impala and posed by it, but now the son shoots a zebra. The beast’s beauty appears to be unconquerable even in death, but then the filmmaker shows the zebra being skinned by the African workers, who also increasingly figure in the film’s narrative. Then the father shoots a giraffe. It feels like an act of terrible, senseless vandalism. When they get to the beast, it is still dying. The camera observes its death throes in a chilling sequence, made all the more so by the family’s pride in their actions. It’s not a boastful pride; it’s a kind of self-serving bourgeois pride in a job well done. Seidl then films the giraffe being loaded onto a truck, driven away and skinned, with the family looking on. The images of the entrails are worse than anything you’d encounter in a horror movie.  The film has captured the obscene reality of killing: a beast that was alive and wondrous a few hours ago is reduced to a carcass. 

The exact message of the movie is never stated, but the viewer comes away with a deep feeling of unease; that this kind of sport should still exist; at the senseless violence of man; and an implicit critique of a class of people who choose to indulge themselves using killing as a kind of bonding experience. The film is framed with two shots, pre and post credits, of horn players performing in a European forest, suggesting that this is a movie which is more concerned with questioning European values than anything else. The reserve is owned by slightly racist Germans, (with suits of armour in their colonial home) who have created a kind of savage idyll. Safari is a very simple piece of filmmaking, but the director succeeds in creating a deeply unsettling narrative from his material. 

import/export (d. ulrich seidl, w. seidl & veronika franz)

Seidl's film arrives at the ICA on the back of some auspicious criticism, with the suggestion that the film presents a modern vision of hell. The Guardian review referenced Jelinek and Haneke, suggesting that contemporary Austria is the frontline in the crisis of the Western soul. The plot intercuts the story of a Ukrainian woman who comes to Austria to earn a living with that of an Austrian who finds himself on a trip to Ukraine, where he installs bubble gum machines in desolate corners of post-Soviet concrete existence.

The two stories counterpoint one another. Olga, in the Ukraine, works as a nurse but also as a sex worker, performing to a video-streamed camera for on-line customers, trying to make sense of the instructions which strange men bark at her in German or English. Not being altogether cut out for this, she leaves her baby and heads for Austria, where she goes through various jobs until spending the last half of the film as a cleaner in a home for the dying. Pauli, the Austrian, initially has a job as a security guard, but after being abused by a group of immigrants and finding himself in debt to various shaven-haired thugs, he joins his odious stepfather on the bubble gum trip to Slovakia and Ukraine. The narrative deliberately refuses to satisfy the audience's subliminal desire to integrate the two stories: Pauli and Olga never meet, and besides the overlap of countries, their stories remain obstinately separated.

You know, early on, as an audience member, that you're not supposed to be enjoying yourself. Olga spends a lot of time walking through frozen estates in heels pushing her baby around in a pram, and Pauli, when he's not shadow boxing at home, is trained by an overly psychotic nutter for his mundane job as a security guard. Before long, Olga is contorting naked for a video camera (and for Seidl's camera) and Pauli's getting handcuffed and soaked in beer before losing his job. The director's ambition is clearly phrased in the stark camera work and bleak set-ups: he's going to make us suffer, he's almost challenging us to sit through his 135 minute festival of bleakness.

I'm all for this kind of thing. I like to see the Western, Eastern, Southern or Northern soul dragged through the mire. Visceral realism is fine by me. But I have to confess that Seidl's attempts didn't really convince. There's a fine line between being shown the deprivation of the Western (or wherever's) soul, and being shown something that someone's trying to sell as the deprivation of the Western soul. My feeling, as Seidl's film protracted itself through a long afternoon, was that this was a case of the latter.

Two things in particular made me suspicious. Firstly, Olga, in her travels through Austria, never seemed to meet anyone even vaguely sympathetic. I dislike sentimentalism in movies, life and love; the desire to make things prettier that they really are, the need to sweeten the pill. However, as I watched poor Olga struggle, it seemed to me that I was being presented with something equally inauthentic - miserablism, if you like. Despite her amiable nature, the only person who's ever nice to Olga swiftly dies of a heart attack. She gets a job with what appears to be a single mother, in an antiseptic house of steel grey, cleaning and looking after her two children. The little boy accuses her of stealing his mobile phone, and when the mother catches her having fun throwing snowballs with her kids, she abruptly sacks her. In the old people's home, Olga's told off for fraternising with the dying by a nurse, who later attacks her in a corridor. It's fairly clear that the only reason this had been set up is because Seidl decided a no-holds-barred catfight in a dark corridor would add to the bankruptcy of the soul his film seeks to depict. The cat fight is nasty, brutish and quite long, and is there for no narrative reason. Seidl is not interested in narrative, because, I couldn't help feeling, it doesn't really suit the miserablistic perception he's promoting. Just as the lamest of Hollywood movies will demand that everything ends sweetly, ignoring character or narrative subtlety, so Seidl demands that the milk is always sour, every morning, even when the cow's been freshly milked.

Another aspect of Seidl's film is its use of location. Two locations in particular: the home for the dying, where all of the second half of Olga's story is set; and the desolate estate in Slovakia where Pauli and his stepfather go on their unlikely trip. This estate is a sea of rubbish, where every home looks like it's on the frontline in the Russian bombardment of Grozny. The inhabitants would appear to be Romany. They live in squalour and would sell their grandmothers if they could make 50 euros from the deal. The estate is clearly a real place. Seidl did his research and found it. It would appear to be one of the less salubrious corners of Europe. However, as I watched the footage, two things crossed my mind. Firstly, the truth we are shown is not comprehensive. The truths we take out of slums are no more absolute than the truths we take out of palaces - filmmakers choose to show what they want to, and Seidl wants this to look as grim as possible. Secondly, this felt exceedingly self-conscious film-making: it draws attention to itself, saying, look what we (the filmmakers) have found. This is also the case in the scenes in the death wards. Seidl shows real people who are clearly close to death, in all their pathetic, childish regression. I don't know if I'm supposed to be shocked by this, or disconcerted. In the end, I reacted by finding it funny, in the manner of a watching a child showing off. No matter how hard the film tries to show us the rawness of life, in the end it's just a film. This is not 'reality'; it's reality through a lens, selected, framed and edited.

It is, perhaps, to Seidl's credit that his film demands such a personal response. (Having said which I have a highly visceral response to things like Notting Hill; Pretty Woman or a number of other products that I find verging on the unwatchable, and no-one gives them credit for that.) However, in comparison to Haneke's work, this seems like lazy film-making. It's not hard to shock, and Seidl uses the trick repeatedly. Rather than try and convey the sickness of the soul through narrative, he does it through a succession of set-ups. Olga's relationship to the child she leaves behind seems to encapsulate the film's problems. On the one hand, it could be seen as part of her sickness that she doesn't appear to miss it; on the other hand perhaps this is just the price of our cauterised, globalised world. Towards the closing stages, the script gives her a moment where she sings a song down the phone to the child, as though wanting to allow a shard of humanity in, but not enough to deflect from the film's nihilism. In the end, it seems to me, the simple fact recurs: the audience needs to care about the characters in order to care about what happens to their souls; and for the audience to care, the film-maker has to too. Otherwise it really is just porn.