Negativland was asked to be guest editor of MAGNET this week, which poses a challenge to such a large collective of members with extremely disparate tastes and obsessions. Members Peter Conheim and Mark Hosler came forward to share what’s been on their minds lately and, indeed, what’s informed their thoughts and work over the years. The group’s new album is entitled It’s All In Your Head and, being entirely about faith, monotheism and why humans believe in God, comes packaged inside of an actual King James Bible. And while religion and intolerance are posing the biggest and toughest dilemmas facing the world today—well, excepting that climate business—Negativland will focus instead this week on such things as sounds, pictures and books. And the impending death of everything due to digital technology.
Peter Conheim: Austrian “documentary” director Ulrich Seidl has yet to really “break” in the United States’ repertory/art-house-theater scene, but has been cranking out beguiling films since 1980, beginning on Austrian television and eventually moving into feature filmmaking. I first discovered his work in a retrospective at Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley around 2003, confronted with a short portrait of a middle-aged high-school teacher titled Der Busenfreund (“The Bosom Friend”). The lines between fact and fiction are blurred in Seidl’s works to the point of literal, blinking incomprehension, and Busenfreund presents a man who illustrates laws of mathematics by carefully drawing brassieres on a chalkboard for his students (who may or may not even be sitting in the same classroom), and going home to his near-comatose mother who is “too bony” and, therefore, he has never established a close relationship with. I stumbled out into the night having absolutely no idea what constituted “truth” any longer.
Seidl’s Models follows a gaggle of coke-sniffing Vienna fashion models who may or may not be being photographed unknowingly through two-way mirrors; Animal Love charts the perilous course that masters of various different animals embark on with their “pets”; Fun Without Limits interviews the aficionados of a rural Austrian amusement park where a key attraction is a grotesque dummy “dying” in an electric chair on an endless loop. Seidl enacts “scenarios” with various non-actors in later films, leading to something vaguely resembling standard narrative fiction, but again, the line between fact and fiction simply never becomes clear. In this way, Seidl pushes Werner Herzog’s “documentary” style to a confrontational extreme from which Herzog generally steps back from the precipice. There is nothing like these films.
Video after the jump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogdK5h8Fpqw
