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Tony McKibbin

Ulrich Seidl

Filming the Wretched

How do you create a gap between the viewer and the subject without arriving at the
condescending? In both documentaries and in his fiction work, Ulrich Seidl seems to
have pushed so far into violating his subjects and characters that he moves beyond
condescension. If many filmmakers work within the realm of dignifying characters in
the style of Rossellini, where he says he finds what is astonishing, unusual and
moving in men, and at the other extreme we have wide-angled caricaturing, say, of
the Coen brothers, then where does Seidl sit?

One thinks here of a couple of scenes in Seidls documentary Animal Love. One of the
subjects is a more or less homeless Austrian who uses his pets to panhandle on the
city streets and malls. At one moment Seidl observes him and his pal asleep in their
bunker, and as the camera moves from the friend sleeping, it sounds as though our
nearby hero is scratching himself off-screen. However as the camera arrives after we
first hear the sound, we notice he is masturbating. Later in the film there are moments
where one character talks in the foreground of the shot while his female partner
stands in the background, on the flats balcony, wearing no more than an open night
gown. Both scenes are presented as documentary, and we are invited to muse over the
ethical nature of the situations and the degree of manipulation involved. Who we
might wonder asked the woman to stand by the balcony in an artful pose, and is it
exploitation on the directors part that she does so? Was our hero really masturbating
or did Seidl ask him to do so for the purposes of a controversial, ethically complicated
image?

Seidl here offers a sort of critique of pure documentary, where what we see is not
necessarily what we get, but it is all we have to play with. In a Coen brothers film the
absurdity of the situation and the contrivance in the framing lead us to believe in the
intentionality of the work, and our purpose within it. For example in the Coens Burn
After Reading, when John Malkovichs character walks off the yacht hes been forced
to live on after his wife has thrown him out, he is shown wearing nothing more than
his underwear and his dressing gown. As he walks with his gut-spilling out, this is
surely self-caricature, and consistent with Malkovichs earlier self-conscious outing in
Being John Malkovich. There are several levels of recognition here. There is Malkovich
accepting the Coens framing as he offers to let it all hang out, the Coens making the

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most of this self-revelation for humorous observation, and the viewer who laughs at
yet another actor in the Coens work playing with their self-image.

But obviously this type of contractual self-consciousness isnt at work in Seidls films.
Whether documentary or fiction, whether Models, Loss is to be Expected and Animal
Love, or Dog Days and Import-Export, the films constantly ask the viewer to partake in
an interrogatory relationship with their own ethical cinematic codes. This is basically
abjection as ethical confrontation, with Seidl framing for maximum ethical disturbance:
at the Berlin festival screening of Dog Days he wished the audience, according to a
piece in Senses of Cinema on the director, a disturbing evening

Now many filmmakers have filmed for the purposes of ethical disturbance, and Gaspar
Nos Seul contre tous and Michael Hanekes Funny Games are two such works that
one can find genuinely demanding: they demand of the viewer a Brechtian
confrontation with the violence in the works. The thirty second warning offering us the
opportunity to leave the cinema in Nos film, before the violence becomes horrific, or
the asides to camera and rewinding of footage in Hanekes, may not be the same as
the self-consciousness of the Coens, but it is still consistent with us knowing where we
stand partly because we know where the filmmaker does. They know their images are
confrontational, and they confront us with this confrontationalism. However, in Seidls
films this confrontation is constant and at the same time unacknowledged. When the
character starts masturbating in Animal Love where do we stand? In a scene from
Loss is to be Expected, some young adults are getting drunk and one of them starts to
dance and strip. The other characters more or less ignore her, and the camera looks
on, as if the camera itself is neither fascinated enough to zoom in nor disapproving
enough to look away. In Animal Love, one man stands naked, holding his dog on a
leash, near the edge of the frame, with the camera holding the shot as if not quite
knowing what to do with this image in front of the lens. We may in such instances
want to ask the director why he chose to include these shots, but apart from the fact
that his oeuvre is full of equally questionable images, to expect an answer from Seidl
is somehow to refuse to ask the question of ourselves. Certainly Seidl has interesting
things to say about his work, and it would be perverse to ignore his comments, but
when were watching the films the most important questions are those we are asking
ourselves in relation to the images shown.

Obviously, though, some of his films are documentaries, other works fiction. Surely
our ethical relationship with the image alters with the nature of the images in front of
us: documentative or fictional? Yet one suspects people will have no less a problem
with a scene near the end of Import-Export than they will with the man masturbating
in Animal Love or the woman stripping in Loss is to Expected. One of the leading
characters is humiliating a teenage prostitute in his hotel room. As this middle-aged
would-be lothario asks her to crouch down with her ass in the air, she obeys with all
the ingenuousness of a child eager to please. Does it make any difference that we
know that in the hotel she is a prostitute playing a prostitute. It was arranged in
advance how far we could go, what should have and what mustnt have happened?
Do Seidls comments in a Sight and Sound interview make that much of a difference to
how we respond to the scene? Obviously everything we know affects what we perceive,
but one of Seidls achievements is to make films, whether fiction or documentary,
where the most pressing questions are within the frame rather than beyond it. Seidl,

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who is a great mise-en-scene filmmaker, wants to generate questions out of the

cinematic space he utilises, rather than a space that so closes off the options that we
are forced, rather than expected, to ask questions beyond the frame, or to feel smugly
placed within it.

If we think of Michael Moores documentaries, the mise-en-scene is almost

non-existent, while in films by the Coens, Wes Anderson and films like Garden State
and Napoleon Dynamite it is so over-determined that it almost contains the
assertiveness of animation. In Moores Sicko, a number of Americans including Moore
himself go over to Cuba as they compare the Cuban health care system to that in the
US. Moore and most of his team are either overweight or obese, yet at no stage is this
acknowledged in relation to issues of health care, though the viewer watching may
muse over this question: whether health care isnt only an issue of the individual in
relation to health insurance as opposed to the state taking care of the individual, as in
Cuba, but the individual in relation to looking after their own bodies. It is a question
not provoked by the film, but one that Moore would rather we ignore as he sets out to
praise Cuban care and condemn the US health insurance system. Imagine the same
figures in a Coen brothers film: the girth of the characters would very much be part of
the mise-en-scene, as the directors would probably utilise the widest of angles to
propose the widest of girths. But, again, pressing questions within the frame would
not be expected to be asked: in both instances the viewers relationship with the
image is basically un-disturbed rather than disturbed.

Seidls world is full of pressing ethical and formal questions, and perhaps this is what
Ed Lachmann, one of his cameramen on Import-Export, meant when insisting Seidl
was a moral filmmaker but not a moralistic one. We dissolve the categories of fiction
and documentary in relation to his work chiefly because in Dog Days or Models many
of the same questions arise out of the framing. When Seidl says obviously you can do
much more in fiction than you can in documentary you can let people die, you can let
them fight, things that in a documentary film would be impossible, nevertheless the
most pertinent issue would seem to reside in the freedom of the frame rather than the
freedom of the content. Where in earlier documentaries like Loss is to be Expected
(1992) and Animal Love (1995) the mise-en-scene and the documentative seem to fit,
by Model (1999) it is as though the framing hems the characters in yet the
non-fictional form doesnt quite offer Seidl the fictionalising possibilities available in
his later work. The inertia of the characters actions cannot be activated by fictional
devices that could give thematic richness to their behaviour. Seidl arrives at clich by
filming clich; it is as though the subject of modelling fascinates him, but the subjects
themselves are without much interest, and the passive gaze that Seidl adopts in all his
work is too readily matched by the passive inexpressivity of his subjects. Another
filmmaker might have abandoned this project of bored, struggling models and found
others more narratively interesting: perhaps models going in for a beauty contest,
models that have recently been offered contracts to do photo-shoots around the world.
But such an approach would somehow have violated Seidls claustrophobic aesthetic.
How to hold to ones aesthetic of inertia which runs through the directors work
without arriving at a certain inertness of thematic inquiry?

Moving into fiction seemed the most obvious answer to the question, and so while
Seidl retains the observational aspect of his work, at the same time the subject

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becomes his property, rather than the filmmaker the property of the subject. Now
clearly Seidl is one documentarist for whom this relationship is far from clear cut
anyway. When we proposed he was a mise-en-scene filmmaker whether as
documentarist or fiction director, it resided chiefly in how he would place a character
in the frame. If we might say that he is loosely in the tradition of Errol Morris and
Werner Herzog, it rests in how Seidl will analyse his subject, will violate the subjects
centrality within the shot. In the film Gates of Heaven, Morris will do so by working
with a cinematic space that says as much about how the filmmaker perceives the
subject or how the filmmaker perceives the subject perceiving himself. When Morris
films someone on the edge of the frame, or cluttered behind his sporting trophies, or
characters that are cropped off in a field of corn, each shot is very different because it
reflects the very different perceptions of the subjects towards themselves. Morris
seems to be looking for a vital quality within them that can be reflected in the shot
choices. This is also true in Seidls work generally, whether the characters/subjects
are fictional or not. It is as though he wants to capture what he perceives as the
essential quality of a person as he films them.

We might think here of the scene in Import-Export where Paul (Paul Hoffman) dances
furiously and alone in the Ukrainian nightclub, or earlier in the film plays with his dog.
In each instance is Seidl pinning the character to the frame in condescending
singularity, or bringing out a singular quality in Paul? If it is the latter this doesnt
only reside again in extra-diegetic information, in knowing that Paul Hoffman likes
dog-fighting. It of course must be reflected in the diegesis. It is often in Seidls holding
of a shot that the possible condescension dissipates. Let us suppose a similar scene of
a character playing and fighting with his dog: the shot would be held just long enough
for us to muse over who this idiot who fights with his dog happens to be, and the film
would move on. But by holding the shot do you increase the condescension or dilute it?
Someone used to the type of shot deployed by the Coens would no doubt say they get
the point, but Seidls reply might be what point does the viewer think they have got?
They might be getting the point as disdain, but would they be getting the point as
attentiveness?

This is clearly part of a wider issue of shot length, and even of shot length in relation
to other Austrian filmmakers, including Michael Haneke, Jessica Hausner, and Our
Daily Bread director Nikolaus Geyrhalter. Yet this is not so much the long take as the
scrutinizing take, as Seidl holds a shot not especially for an inordinate length, but until
it goes beyond the caricatural and into the exhaustively observational. At the
beginning of Dog Days, Seidl films the grumpy, overweight pensioner in a way that
makes him ripe for caricature, but then gives the character so much time and space to
be within the frame in a series of shots, that the caricatural gives way to the
observational, reveals the habitual nature of character. Seidl gives his characters and
subjects time to express themselves, to reveal themselves, and thus to exist within the
frame: as Mattias Frey notes in Senses of Cinema, quoting the critic Constantin Wulff,
Seidl is interested in the accumulation of mundane detail that can lay bare the
insanity of normality. So often in Seidls work a character is observed in such a way
that their routine is revealing of their identity. Whether it is the pensioner Walter
shaving in the mirror in Dog Days, the models applying make-up in Models, the widow
getting up and getting dressed in Loss is to be Expected, Seidl attends to the details of
a life as he reveals the everyday, no matter how personal (a bulemic model vomiting

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into the toilet), or apparently absurd: the drunkard dancing and stripping off in Loss is
to be Expected. When in a Sight and Sound review Richard Falcon wonders whether
Dog Days raises voyeurism to possibly profound, certainly profoundly unsettling
levels, we may ask what allows for this rise, this mundane transcendence if you like.

Residual Christianity some might say, knowing Seidl has admitted that a certain very
basic Christian attitude has stayed with me, and there is plenty religious iconography
in his work: in Loss is to Expected and in Import-Export, for example, and we
shouldnt forget Seidl made a film called Jesus, You Know. But it might be more useful
to think of the shot itself, rather than the filmmakers religious background, or even
the iconography in the work. There is a quote from Pascal in part 4 of that great
Austrian pessimist Thomas Bernhards autobiography, Gathering Evidence: being
unable to overcome death, misery, and uncertainty, men have agreed, in order to be
happy, not to think about them, while in the following section Bernhard offers
detailed scenes of death in a hospital ward that resembles moments from
Import-Export. Like Seidl, Bernhard is if you like a transcendental pessimist, a writer
who pays so much attention to despair that he elevates it to another plane. Bernhard
accepts despair but adds getting a clear view of existence not just seeing through it
but throwing the brightest possible light on it every day is the only possible way to
cope with it. This is not the bright light of religiosity, necessarily, but the bright light
of clarity: close indeed to Pascals notion of wretchedness in Pensees, when the
theologian claims that at least man knows he is wretched; a gift of self-consciousness
a tree for example does not possess.

If one can accept wretchedness as a given of being, then the profoundly disturbing is
perhaps also the profound. The difference between a caricatural approach and a
wretched approach is that the former allows the wretched to pass quickly before our
eyes; the properly wretched does not pass until it has etched itself within our minds.
We move from that is wretched to this is wretched, and this feeling can come about in
at least two ways in Seidls work. One is through the concentrated gaze upon the
scrutinized subjects and objects. In the Romany housing estate in Import-Export we
may believe it is a place that need have nothing to do with our own lives, but Seidl
lingers long enough to make it clear it is nevertheless central to other peoples. As
Seidl dawdles over establishing the environment, as we see the litter strewn estate, as
a knocked door more or less falls off its hinges, as the flats look cold, desperately
neglected and dingy, so Seidl refuses to show us poverty metonymically. He refuses to
allow an image to stand for other, broader images, broader social realities. When for
example a semi-caricaturist like Danny Boyle offers an image of a housing estate in
Trainspotting he does so in low-angled short hand as central character Renton crosses
the frame. This is an image of despair and quite deliberately so, as it manages to be
both metonymic and caricatural. This low-angled shot of the housing estate stands in
for all the other housing estates: the multi-coloured curtains, the washing hanging out
the windows, the looming facades, all indicative of a short-hand approach that makes
us half laugh at our own metonymic recognition. It says less about the housing estate
and more about our awareness of cinematic codes.

Seidls dwelling upon a scene is so insistent that it is as though he wants to destroy

the metonym in an inversion of the neo-realists. If Andre Bazin and others saw
neo-realism as a movement giving cinema the reality of location, and if Rossellini

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could say that neo-realism showed the necessary dignity of man, Seidl offers the
wretchedness of man, whilst also respecting the nature of found realities. There is
little dignity to be found in the housing estate in Import-Export so run down that
dilapidated doesnt do it justice, but there is a fixity of concentration that avoids the
often drive-by nature of the metonymic. Seidl wonders instead how to hold a shot, how
to pay attention to what is in front of the camera, for long enough that one feels the
weight of the location upon our sensibility. This may have little to do with our life, but
that doesnt mean the filmmaker cant find a way of etching it into our nightmares.
When Herzog famously said of Seidls Animal Love, quoted in Indie Wire, that never
before had he looked so directly into hell, it is as if Seidl managed to do so by taking
on board a couple of Herzog comments about the Germans own work. One, where
Herzog says in James Franklins book on New German Cinema, that he believes he has
the ability to articulate images that sit deeply inside us, that I can make them
visible and another where he reckons I believe the power of film lies in the fact
that they operate with the reality of dreams. In Seidls hands cinema moves from
dream to nightmare, but the principle remains the same: to destroy metonymy and
give back to cinema its capacity for the Real.

This then is one way in which Seidl implicates us in the image: through what we might
call the intensified gaze. The second, that also usually contains an equal degree of
concentration, lies in personal deterioration: the inevitability of bodily decline. When
in Dog Days for example an aging housekeeper dances and strips in front of her
employer, Walter, dressed and undressing in Walters late wifes clothes, this is one of
many examples in Seidls work of the inevitability of the flesh: the unavoidably aging
body as it moves towards decay, decline and death. Again what is important is not:
that is aging flesh, but this is aging flesh. Seidl asks us to look at the flesh in such a
way that we do not have the schadenfreude that is the flesh of another, but closer to
the shame of our own. The director needs to create a relationship between self and
other, viewer and viewed, that closes the gap that reality TV and caricatural cinema so
determinedly leaves open. In the brief scene where the housekeeper strips naked,
Seidl holds to a medium long shot as she dances. Walter is seen from within the frame,
but from behind, as we see the rear of the armchair he sits in and the back of his head.
Seidl frames the shot so that the aging flesh is more important than aging desire, as
the film doesnt cut to Walter until the striptease is finished, and his face registers
pleasure but hardly lust as he comments that her striptease was just like in the Orient.
Though the camera keeps its distance from the housekeeper as she strips, this is a
curious form of removal that feels implicative not in the moral sense the way one
might feel horribly incriminated in a porn film where the girl seems to be aggressively
fucked and that the viewer has paid for the dubious pleasure but in an ontological
sense. This is the weight of a life in the weight of the flesh, and it is flesh that cannot
fight decay, no matter if our minds remain youthfully yearning.

To help explain the way that Seidl captures this flesh rather than that flesh, there is a
startlingly confessional moment where Bette Davis says in a biography by Charlotte
Coleman that they say that a woman gets over her desire for sexWell theyre wrong.
My wishes are the same as those of the romantic girl who thought nothing of saying
no. Now as an old woman she talks of her second virginity, because nobody wants her.
Very few filmmakers would or could film such a thought; and again the caricatural
moment comes to mind: the scene where Matt Dillon in Theres Something About

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Mary looks through the binoculars and sees not the beautiful and young Cameron Diaz
he expects, but a woman of advanced years with saggy breasts. The point of view shot,
the surprise and the consequent expected audience response all remove the empathic.
There is empathy in Seidls work, though not in the pitiful sense of the awfulness of
anothers plight that we show concern over, but a cold look at reality that will be,
perhaps not soon, but at some time, our own physical condition. If Laura Mulvey
famously proposed in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema that the gaze was
masculine, could we now not say that in most filmmakers work the gaze is youthful,
youthful in the sense that the assumed viewer is eternally young? Seidl instead shows
not ego ideals, but worst case scenarios: how can a life be lived in its various
manifestations of despair, and is getting old one of those desperate states?

This is obviously where ageism could come in through the back door. Throughout his
work we accept that Seidl shows people in their sixties, seventies and beyond: there
are the various pensioners in Austria and the Czech Republic in Loss is to be Expected,
Walter and his housekeeper in Dog Days, the aged waiting to die in the second half of
Import-Export, but does he not just present them as obsolete bodies awaiting their
demise, when he could more optimistically have presented them as active creatures of
the mind? This would be to ask of Seidl an aesthetic he cares not to pursue. The
question to ask isnt how despairingly does he show the aged, but how
un-optimistically he shows contemporary living. Rich or poor, young or old, Seidl
presents lives reduced to the materiality of the body, and the materiality of our towns
and cities. He is a filmmaker who focuses on impoverishment in all its manifestations.
Whether this is ageing characters like Walter in Dog Days and the alcoholic living in a
rundown room in a rundown building in Loss is to Be Expected, the spacious abode
the grieving couple share in Dog Days, or the luxurious apartment of one particular
character in Animal Love who has candle lit baths and silk sheets on her bed yet is
lonely, Seidl zeroes in on the multiple forms of impoverishment.

One notices this if we compare a scene from Dog Days with one in Loss is to be
Expected. In the former, ex-beauty queen Klaudia walks from her house to meet her
boyfriend in a parking lot at a suburban shopping centre. As the camera travels
behind her as she moves from one space to the next, it may remind us a little of the
scene where Paula in Loss is to be Expected goes out into her backyard and lops the
head off a chicken. In one there is a capitalist world of plenty: Klaudia is well dressed,
her boyfriend has a new car, and the shopping centre looks like an advert for material
comfort. On the other there is Paula living in little more than a shack, who kills the
chicken for basic sustenance. Yet in each instance not only is the formal approach
similar; the problem remains the same what is it that is impoverishing our lives? In
some ways it is the very shopping malls that could be seen to lead to the material lack
elsewhere. There is in how we live our lives a loss that is always to be expected, but
we cannot always know exactly where this loss will be. Will it be on the material level
as it is for Paula and others in the small Czech village where the standard of living is
much lower than across the nearby border into Austria? Is it on the level of grief as it
is for the wealthy couple in Dog Days who have lost their daughter to a car crash? Is it
an issue of decrepitude as it is for those of advanced years dying in hospital in
Import-Export? Is it emotional as it seems to be for so many of the characters in
Animal Love, where human emotions appear so often out of reach? Seidls purpose
seems to be to search out these spaces of loss, locate them, and emphasise them

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through the weight of the shot.

This attempt to explore the places of loss means that, as Seidl himself says, his films
are about society as a whole, no matter if moments before he has said, when I
started making films my interest was particularly in those on the edges of society. I
felt close to themthey are in some ways truer. This may mean no more than that
those on the fringes signify loss more readily than those with plenty. But there is a
danger here that Seidl would then arrive only at material deprivation to reflect deeper
despair, or that the despair is merely social deprivation. But as weve proposed,
comparing moments from Loss is to Be Expected and Dog Days, the importance of
Seidls work resides not in representations of poverty, but the location of misery in
multiple manifestations. When Seidl says of the geriatric hospital scenes in
Import-Export, of course its unpleasant to see certain things, but, you know, reality
is unpleasant, this is a rather pat answer considering reality isnt always so awful,
and that Seidls framing hardly indicates a realist anyway. The question isnt whether
or not people are stuck in geriatric hospitals, nor even whether a filmmaker should
film them, but what the filmmaker is getting at by doing so. What loss is being
exposed in this instance?

The loss would seem to be that of dignity, and is this not at the core of Seidls work,
and at the same time its most problematic aspect? Think of all the scenes that
potentially rob dignity from the subjects in the process of Seidls very filming of them?
Presumably the drunkard in Loss is to be Expected could have been filmed in more
flattering circumstances than doing an inebriated striptease in front of the camera?
What about the dance Seidl films from a partial point of view in Import-Export as
Pauls mother dances for her lover and Paul? Then there is the scene at the beginning
of Dog Days where the grieving mother is in a sex club, being fucked and giving a
blow-job. In each instance the scene could have been removed or filmed differently. If
dignity is constantly being taken from us, Seidl would seem to be part of the problem
not part of the cure.

However if we accept that the flipside of dignity is shame, then maybe there is a place
that is a variation of Nietzches beyond good and evil; a place beyond shame and
dignity and the arrival of the Pascalian notion we invoked earlier: the wretched. At
first glance Seidls presentation of showing subjects and characters shamelessly may
lead to any number of ready terms being thrown at the work: amongst them that it is
condescending, exploitative and aloof. Perhaps all of them have their place, but none
of them take us as far as the notion of the wretched. Now we invoke the term not only
because of Pascals religious inclinations, nor Seidls (he came close to becoming a
priest), nor even through the religious imagery we often find in his films, but chiefly
because the word seems to conjure up a certain self-reflexivity not readily apparent in
the work, but can be explained if we think again of the weight of Seidls shots. Do we
look at the camera or does the camera look at us is this where Seidls self-reflexivity
resides, taking into account a comment Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit make in Forms
of Being? The voyeuristic enjoyment of being let in on a world the camera has
generously made available to our protected vision is naively unreflective; we are in
reality confronted, looked at by a point of view, a world already interpreted. And we
are in turn, they suggest, interpreted, identified by that interpretation.

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What happens is that the cameras point of view contains within it certain assumptions
about us as viewing subjects. Can we say this assumption in Seidls case is not one of
superiority, but one of wretchedness? He doesnt offer us a vision of hell for our
delectation; more for the purposes of implication. Walking out of a Seidl film believing
that it is condescending would be to miss the point and purpose of ones sense of
ethical involvement. When one of the great philosophers of wretchedness, Emmanuel
Levinas, asks in Entre Nous whether the self is the very crisis of the being of beings
in the human, he also adds, I myself already ask myself if my being is justified, if the
Da of my Dasein is not already the usurpation of someones place. How to create,
taking into account Levinass comment and also Dutoit and Bersanis, a viewer who is
positioned within not superiority which would lead to condescension, but
wretchedness that would lead to notions of usurpation?

However though weve said there is much religious imagery in Seidls work, like his
compatriot Michael Haneke his films are chiefly interesting not theologically but
socially, though containing traces of the religious. The potential for self-hatred
stemming from usurping or exploiting another is vitally present in his oeuvre. This can
take the active form of the step-father humiliating the prostitute in Import-Export
since he has paid for her company, or passively so where one of the male nurses at
the hospital where Olga works in Import-Export is clearly attracted to her, and this
leads to a catfight between Olga and another female nurse who is in love with him. It
is passively present as well in Loss is to be Expected, where no more than a border
separates comfort and desperation, and, actively so again, when Wickerl in Dog Days
bullies, abuses and humiliates his older lady lover. This is not wretchedness in the face
of God, but in social dynamics, active and passive, that leads to a sort of
wretchedness of everyday life.

Clearly this will lead many viewers to ask if Seidl is himself part of that wretchedness,
as he is both actively and passively involved in using his subjects and actors to
produce the work he does. Whether employing well-known pornographers (the actor
playing Wickerl), prostitutes (the young woman in the Ukraine in Import-Export),
non-fiction subjects whose lives Seidl documents (Loss is to Be Expected and Animal
Love for example), or non-professionals in fictional roles but based loosely on their
own lives as with Paul (Paul Hoffman) in Import-Export, where Seidl says much of
what he says, much of what he feels in the film is actually him the question of
exploiting people is never far away. But though as we have said Seidl defends himself
against accusations of possible exploitation non-diegetically, it is what is on the screen
that we are left to work with in the cinemas. How do we feel during the viewing
experience, and has Seidl managed to arrive at a perspective that isnt gawping
voyeurism, but instead wretched realisation? This is a question that would still need to
be addressed whether he paid his subjects well or badly, informed them of what the
film was about or gave them no information before filming started, and hopefully his
revelation of the wretched is some sort of answer. It offers a comprehension of the
ethics in the work; though of course we cannot pretend the filmmaker is not involved
in such wretchedness in filming it, and pretend that we are not involved in the viewing
of it. It is of course that very involvement which is central to the works wretchedness.
Is it not this accessing of wretchedness, this sense of watching ourselves as another,
finally, that makes the work moral, as Lachmann would say, rather than moralistic?

Ulrich Seidl - 9 / 10 - (c) Tony McKibbin

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Tony McKibbin

Ulrich Seidl - 10 / 10 - (c) Tony McKibbin