Bilder einer Ausstellung

Ulreich Seidl is a very controversial documentary-maker, not least in his home country of Austria. He provides a revealing picture of his fatherland that seems to be populated entirely by reactionary people with severely repressed perverted obsessions. He shows the people who have to survive in the gutter of an apparently perfectly ordered society. The pinnacle so far in this uneasy oeuvre is Tierische Liebe, that had its international première in 1996 in Rotterdam. In comparison with that masterpiece, the two video films now being screened are less ambitious, but they have all the characteristics that make Seidl so notorious in his own country.In Der Busenfreund he follows a character who looks as if he has just walked out of Tierische Liebe: a nutty maths teacher who sees a sine wave as a woman’s breast and who is obsessed with the busty film star Senta Berger. This tit man lives in a house full of old newspapers with his aged mother (much too leggy and flat-chested for him), with whom he has a bizarre and unpleasant relationship. Bilder einer Ausstellung is a milder Seidl at first sight. In a tight frame, he allows people to talk about their view of a modern painting. This innocent form hides a fierce attack on the caste of art critics and the people interviewed seem oblivious to what they are being used or abused for – a recurrent criticism of Seidl. (GjZ)