Ulrich Seidl

Amongst the potential previous lives of Ulrich Seidl, one can easily picture him in the skin of a museum attendant surrounded by stuffed creatures and freakish visitors. From this imaginary past, he would have kept his fascination for ordinarily abnormal people and for animals. The title of his first film ? Good News – Of Paperboys, Dead Dogs and Other Viennese (1989)… As a scrupulous observer of our human nature, of our passions and deviances (narcotic, religious, sexual), the Austrian director has built up an uncompromising style. Willingly sarcastic, a bit cynical, his humour can be vitriolic. Through his distant but extremely frontal camera, Ulrich Seidl knows how to drag out, with a ferocious acuteness, the lunacy of present-day Austria. Whether documentary or fiction or both – reality being often stage-managed –, his films arouse in us an unusual magnetism. Something in between nausea and fascination.

On a thematic basis, Ulrich Seidl’s films seem to be guided by a single leitmotiv : men are alienated. Even if this alienation has different faces, an oppressive statement emerges from all of them : loneliness, craziness or imbecility swallow up our individuality. In Animal Love (1995), the protagonists – separated or adulterous couples, old boys on the dole, young beggars, and even a left-alone diva – fill their boredom with a boundless adoration for their dogs, cats, rabbits, ferrets, etc. What kind of “neurotic symptoms” and claustrophobia induce these lonely folks to over-discipline or fondle and lick their four-legged friends all over ? Is our society so alienating that human beings forget, unconsciously or not, their “moral codes” and dignity ?

In Dog Days (2001), the inhabitants of a suburban area treat each other like dogs. Amongst them, Anna, a very talkative and retarded young hitchhiker, will eventually be manhandled and abused by the neighbours for an insignificant crime she probably didn’t even commit. Either different or victims of a collective indifference, Seidl seems fond of lost sheep : the innocents, the forgotten, the fringes of society, even the dying patients of geriatric wards… The ‘enfant terrible’ of Austrian cinema is indeed far from being misanthropic. Even if Vivian, Lisa and Tanja, the blond chicks of Models (1998), shine with their superficiality, Ulrich Seidl takes particular care to uncover their fragility. Is this the reason why he likes to put the camera in the place of a mirror, or in the middle of a corridor facing an (engaged) toilet ? To glean true moments of humanity beyond any voyeurism ? Probably ; the long duration of the shots, their fixity and their aesthetic rigour, confirm just that.

As if to serve his entomological approach, our adept of closed spaces (bathrooms, bedrooms, even churches in Jesus, You Know, 2003), systematically captures daily intimate moments with a Martin Parr-like sense of photography : confession, defecation, depilation, ablution, and, fornication. However indiscreet these scenes are, there is no vulgarity. By filming the ‘unseen’, he aims to lay bare the existential vulnerability that man confides or tries to hide in his everyday life.

Slim or worn, young or wrinkled, anorexic or pot bellied, ‘seidlian’ bodies are often nude, in ridiculous, touching or degrading situations. However, rather than corporal, the obscenity denounced by Seidl is definitely discursive (The Bosom Friend, 1997 ; Dog Days). Sometimes, as in Import/Export (2007), bodies are for sale - virtually or, further East, for real. Promised lands only reveal disappointment.

To keep our heads high when faced with all these modern fears, let’s not give up on love and old melodies, like Sepp Paur, the rejected widower of Losses To Be Expected (1992). Clearly when it comes to being aware of the worst in life, Ulrich Seidl’s films are the best treatment…

Emilie Padellec