Greetings gentle readers and welcome to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today it’s an Austrian film, Import/Export,a grim portrait of life in Europe for the poor and powerless. It also contains explicit sexual situations. You’ve been warned.
Note: Sometimes links from Rarefilms.com don’t show thumbnails, sometimes the thumbnails appear and disappear for some reason. The link is below.
Next week’s film: Stalker
Reviews of Import/Export:
Letterboxd says:
With every Seidl film I see—this being my fourth—I’m becoming a bigger fan. I instantly responded to his unique mix of minimalism and eccentricity, bleakness and humor. He stages his scenes with such clarity of vision, everything in the frame tells a story, everything has a history, and there’s always a perfect balance of objects and emptiness. There is always so much space left. It feels like a space reserved for us, for the audience to reflect in, to come up with our own interpretations, to blend our own stories into his. He never tells you what to see or feel, and I appreciate that. The way he can express a complicated emotion or the absurdities of our existence with just an image is truly masterful. Many moments reminded me of classical paintings, religious paintings even. The old Catholicism just comes through, which I know is another reason why I relate to the director, and to Austrian film in general. They’ve got their faith in their bones and let it wreck them or lift them up. Sometimes both.
and
After the screening director Ulrich Seidl told the audience that he is convinced that the Latin phrase “Homo homini lupus est” rings true for all human interaction: man is a wolf to his fellow man.
The film was shot in sequence and on location in Austria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Ukraine. It is full of memorable scenes that have stuck with me even though it’s more than three years ago that I have last seen it.
One sequence takes place in an abandoned, dilapidated socialist housing project that has been taken over by Roma. The building does not have plumbing anymore and the garbage does not get collected, so all waste goes out the windows. This “set-piece”, a place that exists in reality, imbues the scene with a sense of dread that I have rarely experienced in a film.
In spite of Seidl’s bleak worldview his masterpiece Import/Export is a cloud with a silver lining. Even though our protagonists have to endure hardships there is still hope for betterment or a new beginning. Even though there are scenes that are very hard to watch it is all worth it in the end.
Eye for Film says:
Seidl’s Import/Export, for all its slender storyline, exposes uncomfortable boundaries between fiction and fly-on-the-wall documentary – and it’s no half-hearted experiment. Shocking yet beautiful, the film seamlessly blends real people’s lives with those of the story’s protagonists, as Seidl sincerely questions our understanding of what might be acceptable. And then kicks it home with a vengeance. As you wince at the relentless coldness, graphic sexuality, or the bodily functions of an Alzheimer’s patient, the film twists the screw. Yes, this is not only realistic, it is real. Maybe too real. It is happening. And much as you might struggle in the early stages, it is undeniably Art.
Yet rather than voicing a triumph of style over substance, Seidl succeeds in gripping the audience from moment to moment, through more than two and a half hours of unpredictably fascinating events. I admit I half expected a punctuated boredom from what is an inconsequential plot. But I experienced one of the more captivatingly fresh films of the year.
My take: A dark and disturbing film. First of all are the class issues. Both of the protagonists are working low paying dead end jobs at the start of the film. They both leave their respective countries looking for a better life. They both endure burdensome power differentials, humiliation, and precarity.
The film’s visuals tell a similar story. Snowy, bleak vistas dominate the scenery alongside visions of poverty blasted housing complexes and ratty bars. Garbage plays a role as well. One particularly powerful and depressing scene involves gumballs and and a horde of feral children. This stuck with me long after finishing the film, perhaps the highest compliment one can pay a film.
In general, themes of debt, ethnic bigotries, and family issues are woven through the sparse storyline. Some have criticized this sparseness but I think it adds another dimension to the film. The protagonists lives are sparse, devoid of hope or substance. A final note is the comparison of a wealthy country versus a poor one. How do both of them manage to produce such similarly bitter conditions for their citizens?
Director: Ulrich Seidl
Notable Actors: Ekateryna Rak, Paul Hoffman
Plot (Spoilers!):
Olga is from Eastern Ukraine. She lives with her mother and her child, working as a nurse for scant pay. In an effort to make ends meet she takes a job doing internet porn.
She knows this is a dead end situation. So she packs up a suitcase and leaves for Austria where a friend can help her get on her feet. Her first job is as a live-in nanny but that goes awry when her suspicious and domineering boss accuses her of theft. She then lands a job as a hospital cleaner where she endures humiliation and dashed hopes.
In a kind of mirror image, Pauli is a young Austrian who is down on his luck. He has lost his job as a security guard, his girlfriend has dumped him, and he owes everyone money. His stepfather gets him a crappy job as a gambling machine installer and the pair make their way to Ukraine to install the machines. Along the way they encounter a hellish Romani neighborhood where poverty and prostitution abound. After a drunken night at a seedy Ukrainian bar, Pauli becomes disgusted with his stepfather and strikes out on his own looking for pick-up work.
I have some excuses to make, sorry.
Sinbad is not known to me from my childhood and I came to it new. I couldn’t watch it owing to the score. It’s like the music version of blackface. Oh well. But it was nice to see Tom Baker being evil.
I can’t do grim social realism (I’ve been warned!) and I’ve never been able to get anywhere with Tarkovsky despite the reputation and critical consensus.
May I offer for your consideration, semper, Welt am Draht (Wold on a Wire). It’s on YouTube. To anyone that hasn’t seen it I recommend maintaining the minimum of foreknowledge. To those who, like me, aren’t keen on Fassbinder’s better known films, it’s quite different, a low-budget TV sci-fi thriller, and a lot of fun.
I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy the posted films! I’ll look into World on a Wire. Thanks!
“May I offer for your consideration, semper, Welt am Draht (Wold on a Wire). It’s on YouTube.”
The movie has two parts, but I only found the first one on YouTube.
I found both of them.
No matter whether I input “World on a wire” or “Welt am Draht”, with or without “1973”, with or without “Fassbinder”, with or without “part” or “Teil” or “part 2” or “Teil 2”, I only ever get the first part of the movie. And none of the sites posting the first part has the second one available. And the only versions I get is the original German one (not a problem for me), or the original one with Turkish subtitles…
YouTube is search has become as rotten as Google search. Or there is some kind of geographic filtering going on (it looks like I get results meant for Germany?)
Anyway, there are other places where I can find that movie.
I’ve searched YouTube pretty hard now and I couldn’t find it with English subs. It’s available in German and with Turkish subs. So I guess this is no candidate.
It was available on YouTube last year. I watched it three times! YouTube is quite unstable especially for things like this that violate copyright.
I shoulda checked before suggesting it.
There is a US-German remake of “Welt am Draht”, “13th Floor” from 1999, directed by German Josef Rusnak. It was backed by Roland Emmerich´s company, an expensive flop for some reason but not bad. Of course totally different animal than the original two-part film.
It´s on YT in excellent German. The Engl. version for some reason is poorer.
Engl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eI6YLsOmUA
German
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FJ83FWNIM0
👍
If possible, before watching Stalker, read the sf novel Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, on which it is based.
Free pdfs are available online!
This is the first Sunday morning movie I’ve watched. The fear and tension kept me looking forward to what was coming. In fact the whole situation is repugnant and obnoxious, so much buying and selling of flesh and whatever. The Ukrainian thread is stronger runs deeper than the Austrian one, to my thinking. ‘Stalker’ can also be seen on YouTube. At the moment, I have a dripping shower tap and the sound of the drops splashing in the pail underneath it reminds me of Tarkovsky!
– Thoughts on Seidl and the nature of documentary – fiction film –
My salutes to choosing director Ulrich Seidl.
In Germany filmmakers like to say, Austrians have the better films and filmmakers but also the crazier ones.
Many would argue that´d apply to Seidl in particular.
Whether one agrees or not, if anything Seidl brought to the broad public´s attention that the difference between documentary film (where he came from) and fiction is merely a relative one. They both eventually belong to the same art form and only are representations of different genres.
So if in other NC posts e.g. “Leviathan” is being discussed to question political economy, Seidl e.g. could well be useful to probe into the AI-related discussion about veracity of film, image and reality.
Seidl is proof that this problem in essence has been around long before AI. In fact it is part and parcel of film and photographic imagery since their existence in the 19th century.
Seidl who also graduated from the elite Austrian film institutions in journalism AND film originated with Austrian State TV documentary short and long forms and over the years became more and more radical pushing and testing the established limits and standards of documentary.
My major contention is that the late Seidl is almost exclusively using freaks and pushes form over content.
One of the movies in which he was able to blend both in a provoctive but seamless way was his 1999 “MODELS” about three Viennese models trying to make it in the high level fashion model business.
They played themselves but had been collaborating with Seidl in writing a feature-length screenplay for that documentary. They are caricatures but that´s because the world they perform in already is caricature (fashion industry).
Only German but you will immediately recognize the artist behind it.
https://vk.com/video-148753270_456239720?ysclid=mim8z4cmom437283678
As obvious parallels in visuals go – IMPORT/EXPORT was filmed by two heavy-weights, legendary US cameraman Ed Lachman and Seidl regular and one of Austria´s most important, Wolfgang Thaler.
For those who prefer more classic forms, maybe GOOD NEWS is interesting too, a film about mainly immigrants selling newspapers, its 35 years old now.
German site on that film:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_News_(1990)
excerpts 4 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoEIkN_zMTw
IMPORT/EXPORT is also as often a collaboration between Seidl and his wife/well-known producer, Veronika Franz.
The idea to stage and even do intricate mis-en-scene in documentaries too and make it appear as if it were fiction is as old as the medium.
For instance with leftist Dutch documentary director Joris Ivens in the interwar years.
Here the documentary was clearly labeled but the steps in the production process were close to what was usual for fiction film, since in that era cameras and lighting equipment had to be used on location and made any shot outside a huge hustle.
More radically and purely executed was this kind of approach by American Classic Robert Flaherty.
Or the Soviet Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein.
Flaherty worked with his protagonists, lived their lives not unlike Seidl. (e.g. “MAN OF ARAN” 1934).
Flaherty is thus an early ethnologic filmmaker, however less transparent in style than French legend Jean Rouch, who mostly comes to mind with that form of film.
In a way Seidl is a domestic ethnologic filmmaker himself.
Seidl liked to tell film students that he would be around people for months and years who would then become his protagonists, individuals who 99% of society would despise; that he would go and hang out at filthy places you usually would not; that he would have the guts to engage into situations filmmakers usually wouldn´t.
That led naturally to the style he developed and is famous for today. I assume in our current era many would call it „hyprid“ (a term which I would firmly reject.)
By no means is Seidl the only (former) documentary director working this method but since he moved into fiction film now officially his reach is bigger and he has thus become a brand. In contrast serious documentaries have remained a fringe medium.
Another early example:
If you e.g. watch Eisenstein´s movie about the 1917 Revolution, “October”, made as early as 1928, it is unclear from today´s standard view whether it´s documentary or fiction even though it´s a piece with a lot of public spectacle.
In excellent 4K, English subs (score used, Shostakovitch!):
100 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-baFaZQaDA
The mass scenes were I believe all staged, the scenes with the politicians picturing the political events were staged, the politicians were actors. Most audiences today would most likely buy the intricate staging in that film as original news footage. And there is a subconscious line from that to Seidl.
The young Luchino Visconti too was moving on that path with his early LA TERRA TREMA (1948) about fishermen in Sicily. He had lived with the villagers for months and developed the story and executed it together with them.
Final example, Robert Kramer´s “ROUTE ONE” (1989). Here Kramer devised a trick which I found a bit odd but I would recommend it to everyone since this is mainly an American site and the film has some excellent stuff about the “old” US – Kramer hired an actor who would play some fictional character and move throughout the movie as the “protagonist”, accompanied by Kramer in real situations (“BORAT” repeated that 20 years later in a goofy and sometimes primitive way).
“Import-Export” may not come across as “fun” movie but I would urge everyone to watch this and also the interview with Seidl which is on that same page linked above. Maybe it opens a door for some. It´s worth it.
After all if we speak seriously about the financial crisis, about paintings, or poetry or op-eds, the same approach and sincerity is legitimate with film.
Excellent comment. Thank you, AG !
Totally off topic but I’m reading a good library ebook called When I Fell From the Sky and it turns out to be the basis for a Werner Herzog TV film that I have not seen. Will look it up in the morning as it is on Youtube. Details here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Hope_(film)
Just cause you mention Herzog, Wiki is quoting his praise of Seidl´s GOOD NEWS:
“Mit solcher Konsequenz, mit solchem Stilwillen hat noch selten jemand im Film die furchtbare Regelmäßigkeit des Alltags, den Wahnsinn der Normalität gezeigt.“ /
“Rarely has anyone in film depicted the terrible regularity of everyday life, the madness of normality, with such consistency and stylistic conviction.”
Herzog doc free to watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msipyM4vyLg