14 - Heimat: Diaspora—Ulrich Seidl’s Paradies: Liebe

Summary

ULRICH SEIDL's FILMS attract and repel their viewers. As a director, he delights in mixing the hyper-visual style of a cinema of attractions with the harsh socio-critical inventory of counter-cinematic experimental documentaries. The formal and narrative approaches to his “fringe and freak” topics integrate the practices and history of reality television with those of classic documentary. He is infamous for his mixture of experimental and exacting approaches to dealing with largely non-professional actors: “I do not rehearse. I don't want the actors to know what's coming. They mustn't prepare any dialogue; when they have to act together, I instruct them all separately, so none of them knows what I have told the other.” In our Internet age of “been-there-done-that,” Seidl manages to find, explore, (re)present and challenge the remnants of social taboos. His films are not for the squeamish, and they are definitely not politically correct. But they expose the fault lines of gendered and racialized identity construction by traversing surface culture to reveal usually obstructed intersectionalities, and this kind of unmasking will be the focus of my interest here.

The director's cultural anthropological methodology is evident in the way his topics intersect with Austrian history and the country's selfadvertised stereotypical representation, but also its hidden social and cultural practices. For example, in Paradies: Liebe Seidl deliberately connects the common Austrian ritual of taking a hike or a Sunday walk to a shopping spree for a sex slave. Like his Austrian compatriot Elfriede Jelinek, he forces everyday social practices and taboos to collide through associative imagery. What Jelinek deconstructs with the help of language games, Seidl performs cinematographically. His 2012–13 Paradise trilogy (Love—Faith—Hope) is but a chain in the link from his 1995 bestiality documentary Tierische Liebe (Animal Love) to the 2014 Im Keller (In the Basement), in which his camera roams Austrian basements outfitted for secrets and fetishes. In Paradies: Liebe (Paradise: Love, 2012) Seidl opted for a Kenyan beach resort as the main location.