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COUNTERPUNCH, June 22, 2018
If the goal of a film, whether fictional or documentary, is to show
rather than tell, then Nikolaus Geyrhalter is in a class by himself.
Born in 1972, the Austrian documentary filmmaker has 52 credits to his
name. Six of his greatest works have now been collected into a DVD set
that is available from Icarus, a distributor of leading-edge,
left-of-center films based in Brooklyn (where else?).
My initial exposure to Geyrhalter was back in 2006, when my review of
“Our Daily Bread” referred to its preference for “showing” rather than
“telling”:
“Our Daily Bread” studiously avoids editorializing of any sort. The
images themselves are sufficient to reveal food production as a mix of
Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” and Frederick Wiseman’s “Meat,” a 1976
documentary about the livestock business that “Our Daily Bread” clearly
reflects. The main difference between Wiseman and Geyrhalter is that the
latter eschews sensationalism of all sorts. While his film might lack
the visceral impact of Wiseman’s, it is arguably more persuasive because
it depicts the food industry as somehow inextricably linked to advances
in technology and science. Geyrhalter challenges the audience to reject
the paradigm set forth in his film. In so doing, they might be rejecting
civilization as we know it.
A decade later I saw another Geyrhalter film titled “Homo Sapiens”, that
like “Our Daily Bread”, defiantly lacked a single spoken word either by
through narration or dialog. Nor is there a film score, one of the more
annoying and omnipresent presences in documentary films today.
This silent film, however, did not need much “telling” since the images
and haunting background sounds spoke for themselves. You see the
detritus of cities and towns that have lost their raison d’être, namely
their role in the circulation of capital. Once again, sans narration,
you can only surmise that the abandoned hospitals, factories, schools,
jails, laboratories, forts, etc. were abandoned because they became
redundant just like the homo sapiens who lived and worked in the cities
and towns where they were located. You get some of the same feeling of
desolation and loss traveling around Sullivan County where I grew up—the
Borscht Belt. When I strolled around the ruins of the once glamorous and
thriving Nevele Hotel in Ellenville, I could not help but feel that I
was in a kind of graveyard.
full:
https://louisproyect.org/2018/06/22/a-nikolaus-geyrhalter-retrospective-on-dvd/
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