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ANT STREET
A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO EAT, A TIME TO DIE
On Michael Glawogger's film Ant Street (Die Ameisenstrasse)
France and the United States can claim to have what are probably still the two "healthiest" film cultures. Since the seventies, if not earlier, their unbroken awareness of their own history has helped them to stay alive and kicking. This very awareness, though - a new kind of immutable cultural-genetic information - can be a mixed blessing, and every single film has to decide for itself how to handle it. (Because both the French and the American film industries achieved a high standard of production at an early stage, elements of "self-consciousness" and self-reference were quicker to emerge there than elsewhere.)
In Austria, on the other hand, production standards have not always been high, and a widespread awareness of its and other countries' cinematic legacy - in terms of both genetic information and actual knowledge - is sorely lacking. Many Austrian films, for instance, are not even aware that they are films (they define and market themselves as extended theatrical productions, cabaret programmes or television series), let alone that they, their companion pieces and their public share a common experience, a common "film history" to which they could beneficially respond.
The film Die Ameisenstrasse adopts a thoroughly assertive posture in assuming this shared legacy. In the continuing absence of a broad-based foundation and consensus for such an assumption, however, the director has been obliged (as it were) to set up his plot as if he were preparing an experiment, deliberately engineering collisions to investigate the scope for concocting a Viennese film that is at one and the same time contemporary, mindful of its (film) history, and authentic. Die Ameisenstrasse is not yet the film that suggests, but it constitutes a part of a literacy campaign that has set its sights on such a film.
* * *
There are things in Die Ameisenstrasse which, from the very start, point to a sense of tradition and familiarity to lull the spectator into a feeling of security. The reassuring off-screen narration, for example, in the person of Alfred Navratil, civil servant in the employ of the Central Statistical Office, who is intimately bound up in the plot. Or the musical score which - with unstinting irony- evokes Vienna. Or the elaboration of the tenants as recurrent, recognizable characters (... The same people for years on end ...). Then there is the first of the collisions, a copy-book instance of the dramaturgical devices fostered by the genre cinema: the car which almost runs down Alfred Navratil at the crossing contains Wanecek I (house owner, rich uncle) and Wanecek II (house owner in spe, nephew and heir). As the car turns into the street, it ushers in a fateful course of events in the life of Alfred and the other tenants.
Only half a stone's throw away from this feeling of unassailable security there lurks the "black comedy": the stark improbabilities, the whimsicalities and the nonsensicalities of daily life (the dog Willi Halbgebauer with his pitiful bandages; the emotionally crippled 12-year-old Ignaz Haslinger and his obsessions; the retired railwayman Antal Zwokic who, hard of hearing, watches a television programme made up of interminable slow pans across Vienna's Central Cemetery accompanied by the deafening pounding of folk punk).
And finally, several stages removed, the "realities" of daily life, still black but no longer comic: a glimpse (included regardless of the dramatic exigences of the feature film) inside the kitchen of the one-time Yugoslav concierge (where film role and real life converge), and the hushed study of an old, old man trying in vain to eat his soup.
The opening fifteen minutes of Die Ameisenstrasse juxtapose all these narrative approaches. The inflection keeps changing, as if to make the point that the repertoire of the "Viennese comedy" ⎯ if only it is taken seriously ⎯ is bound to comprise far more disparate elements that is generally conceded by those whose goal is the uniform classification of genres and the evocation of the "typical".
Michael Glawogger's brand of "Viennese comedy" highlights the contrasts. His idiom is often more reminiscent of the documentary and the European art film than of a run-of-the-mill genre production. Studiously avoiding the obvious and the trite, he works mainly with sequence shots. He transposes his experience as a cameraman and his collaboration on Ulrich Seidl's (documentary) films to new, unexplored areas (lighting, framing, the minute details of the apartment interiors). And he generously and enthusiastically plunders the rich resources of (several generations of) Viennese acting history to instill life and significance into stale routine and lack-lustre clichés.
As the film proceeds, we register that something is shifting: not an earthquake, but a series of minor (narrative, cultural) tremors. At the level of the story line: the old owner dies, uncertainty spreads, a second and a third resident of the house die, the animals go strange, the building starts to move. And beneath the story level, above it and in the cracks: Bunuel's ángel exterminador returns (in a characteristically Viennese guise) after an absence of thirty years to focus his attention on another sorry band of human sufferers. Stripped down to the realism of Viennese working-class suburbia, the American horror movie with its insect invasions, its body-snatcher paranoia, its predilection for skeletons and rotting corpses decamps to Eastern Central Europe, the home of its most lurid fantasies. Even the no-nonsense fraternity of Lynch, Greenaway & Sons, quoted word for word, suddenly starts to feel like a quintessentially Viennese (and inwardly digested) episode. The stuffed wood grouse which comes flying through the air to land in Halbgebauer's clock & watch shop, to a serially insipid string accompaniment and at the (chronometrically) operative moment, prompts no more than a blasé shrug of the shoulders in a suburban setting where there are no surprises left.
* * *
Die Ameisenstrasse makes some of its points better than others, but on the key issues it convincingly upholds high standards of courage, decency and intelligence. Which is why it is the next step that is the most important. Without it, the above qualities would in large measure be no more than cinematic masturbation or mere abstraction.
Because Glawogger has opted for an approach to the cinema that is demonstrably aware of the artistic tools of its trade, of its past and of its present-day standing, he impels us to rethink the classical film's uncritical assumptions about the self-evidence and the continuity of space, time and human character. Glawogger's film cuts a broad swathe through the familiar, at least semi-classical genre of the "Viennese comedy", allowing us to stand back and take a new look at the raw materials of the film's structure. The recurrent themes of Die Ameisenstrasse are the measurement of time and space, the shortage of time and space, alienation from time and space.
The film dwells on stop watches with a dual time-keeping function and on hundreds of other clocks running out of sync. It dwells on the historical gap between two generations, one of which "still takes time" to have meals together (even as death approaches), while the other "is sorry but doesn't have time". It dwells on the meticulously counted time which a statistician takes each day to get from the house to the traffic lights (which invariably turn red as he reaches them), and on the equally precise measurement of the time which his microwave oven takes to heat his dinner each evening. And it dwells on the halting of time when Fate taps the dying man on the shoulder with the words "It's time", on the halting of time perpetuated in stuffed animals, and on the screaming of time as, after three deaths in the house, the camera plunges three times from top to bottom through the watchmaker's shop to zoom in on the watchmaker himself. A time to live (not much), a time to eat (set meal times), a time to die (ample time).
Glawogger subjects space to an equally ruthless critique. The tenement building seems to emanate the familiar, collective cosiness which is conventionally home to the genre. But only at first sight. On closer scrutiny the house emerges as a sinister edifice threatening its residents economically (cf. rent laws and relevant commentaries), psychically (cf. isolation / claustrophobia / manic acquisitiveness) and physically (cf. public safety inspectors / dilapidation / termite infestations). It is a building riddled with cynicism. True: two identical apartments can be switched to alleviate an individual's suffering in the short term. But in the long run it victimises its pathetic, ant-like residents with its vicious spitefulness. It is a monstrous, vigorous, digestive creature that can make fire and water go haywire and relentlessly impels each of its victims (including the self-proclaimed mastermind, Wanecek II, who thought he was safe) towards the final calamity ⎯ while workmen and policemen repeatedly busy themselves with the utterly senseless task of surveying the street in front of the scene of the disaster.
Glawogger's exploration of the time and space dimensions is subtly traced in the film's handling of time and space. But it has a further impact on the action in that it destabilises the characters. This occurs in two ways: in terms of the plot (the humour stops being funny; the paranoia grows oppressive; a fall down the stairs leaves its victim funny in the head; madness becomes rampant; fire brings death), but also in terms of the way we feel about the characters. By the end of the film we have lost our ability to identify with them in the way we had grown accustomed to doing. The figures have, literally, moved away from us, have started to evince traits of character which are bound to worry us because we neither want to claim such traits as our own nor can we confidently claim to be bereft of them (the way identification in the usual sense is supposed to work). Not that the impact of this is a sudden shock. Rather, it is a gradual process, more tragic than comic.
* * *
We take a step backwards, into the Viennese milieu. Midnight in the city of Nestroy (an Epilogue in Heaven, to turn Faust upside down). The closing song goes: ... Angels take forever, assholes go fast. Messrs Freitag, Weinberger and Wanecek II have emerged from the fray drunk as lords, but they have come through. Asked who the new owner will be, Wanecek II mumbles: The next asshole, probably. The ángel exterminador lifts its shiny black wings from the tenement building, making way for the "asshole exterminador", the modern-day, drab, local incarnation of destiny, immobility, catastrophe that is left over when the metaphors run out and culture takes time out. It is on this figure that the next Viennese film needs to focus; a film which will be able to draw not only on the mainstream output of Forst, Hochbaum and Emo, of Cook, Patzak and Novotny (and the short Sturminger films) but also on Die Ameisenstrasse, an admirable experiment in post-modern local comedy.
Alexander Horwath
© Petro Domenigg
PRESS RELEASE DOWNLOAD:
press ant street.pdf
PRESS RELEASE:
ANT STREET
A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO EAT, A TIME TO DIE
On Michael Glawogger's film Ant Street (Die Ameisenstrasse)
France and the United States can claim to have what are probably still the two "healthiest" film cultures. Since the seventies, if not earlier, their unbroken awareness of their own history has helped them to stay alive and kicking. This very awareness, though - a new kind of immutable cultural-genetic information - can be a mixed blessing, and every single film has to decide for itself how to handle it. (Because both the French and the American film industries achieved a high standard of production at an early stage, elements of "self-consciousness" and self-reference were quicker to emerge there than elsewhere.)
In Austria, on the other hand, production standards have not always been high, and a widespread awareness of its and other countries' cinematic legacy - in terms of both genetic information and actual knowledge - is sorely lacking. Many Austrian films, for instance, are not even aware that they are films (they define and market themselves as extended theatrical productions, cabaret programmes or television series), let alone that they, their companion pieces and their public share a common experience, a common "film history" to which they could beneficially respond.
The film Die Ameisenstrasse adopts a thoroughly assertive posture in assuming this shared legacy. In the continuing absence of a broad-based foundation and consensus for such an assumption, however, the director has been obliged (as it were) to set up his plot as if he were preparing an experiment, deliberately engineering collisions to investigate the scope for concocting a Viennese film that is at one and the same time contemporary, mindful of its (film) history, and authentic. Die Ameisenstrasse is not yet the film that suggests, but it constitutes a part of a literacy campaign that has set its sights on such a film.
* * *
There are things in Die Ameisenstrasse which, from the very start, point to a sense of tradition and familiarity to lull the spectator into a feeling of security. The reassuring off-screen narration, for example, in the person of Alfred Navratil, civil servant in the employ of the Central Statistical Office, who is intimately bound up in the plot. Or the musical score which - with unstinting irony- evokes Vienna. Or the elaboration of the tenants as recurrent, recognizable characters (... The same people for years on end ...). Then there is the first of the collisions, a copy-book instance of the dramaturgical devices fostered by the genre cinema: the car which almost runs down Alfred Navratil at the crossing contains Wanecek I (house owner, rich uncle) and Wanecek II (house owner in spe, nephew and heir). As the car turns into the street, it ushers in a fateful course of events in the life of Alfred and the other tenants.
Only half a stone's throw away from this feeling of unassailable security there lurks the "black comedy": the stark improbabilities, the whimsicalities and the nonsensicalities of daily life (the dog Willi Halbgebauer with his pitiful bandages; the emotionally crippled 12-year-old Ignaz Haslinger and his obsessions; the retired railwayman Antal Zwokic who, hard of hearing, watches a television programme made up of interminable slow pans across Vienna's Central Cemetery accompanied by the deafening pounding of folk punk).
And finally, several stages removed, the "realities" of daily life, still black but no longer comic: a glimpse (included regardless of the dramatic exigences of the feature film) inside the kitchen of the one-time Yugoslav concierge (where film role and real life converge), and the hushed study of an old, old man trying in vain to eat his soup.
The opening fifteen minutes of Die Ameisenstrasse juxtapose all these narrative approaches. The inflection keeps changing, as if to make the point that the repertoire of the "Viennese comedy" ⎯ if only it is taken seriously ⎯ is bound to comprise far more disparate elements that is generally conceded by those whose goal is the uniform classification of genres and the evocation of the "typical".
Michael Glawogger's brand of "Viennese comedy" highlights the contrasts. His idiom is often more reminiscent of the documentary and the European art film than of a run-of-the-mill genre production. Studiously avoiding the obvious and the trite, he works mainly with sequence shots. He transposes his experience as a cameraman and his collaboration on Ulrich Seidl's (documentary) films to new, unexplored areas (lighting, framing, the minute details of the apartment interiors). And he generously and enthusiastically plunders the rich resources of (several generations of) Viennese acting history to instill life and significance into stale routine and lack-lustre clichés.
As the film proceeds, we register that something is shifting: not an earthquake, but a series of minor (narrative, cultural) tremors. At the level of the story line: the old owner dies, uncertainty spreads, a second and a third resident of the house die, the animals go strange, the building starts to move. And beneath the story level, above it and in the cracks: Bunuel's ángel exterminador returns (in a characteristically Viennese guise) after an absence of thirty years to focus his attention on another sorry band of human sufferers. Stripped down to the realism of Viennese working-class suburbia, the American horror movie with its insect invasions, its body-snatcher paranoia, its predilection for skeletons and rotting corpses decamps to Eastern Central Europe, the home of its most lurid fantasies. Even the no-nonsense fraternity of Lynch, Greenaway & Sons, quoted word for word, suddenly starts to feel like a quintessentially Viennese (and inwardly digested) episode. The stuffed wood grouse which comes flying through the air to land in Halbgebauer's clock & watch shop, to a serially insipid string accompaniment and at the (chronometrically) operative moment, prompts no more than a blasé shrug of the shoulders in a suburban setting where there are no surprises left.
* * *
Die Ameisenstrasse makes some of its points better than others, but on the key issues it convincingly upholds high standards of courage, decency and intelligence. Which is why it is the next step that is the most important. Without it, the above qualities would in large measure be no more than cinematic masturbation or mere abstraction.
Because Glawogger has opted for an approach to the cinema that is demonstrably aware of the artistic tools of its trade, of its past and of its present-day standing, he impels us to rethink the classical film's uncritical assumptions about the self-evidence and the continuity of space, time and human character. Glawogger's film cuts a broad swathe through the familiar, at least semi-classical genre of the "Viennese comedy", allowing us to stand back and take a new look at the raw materials of the film's structure. The recurrent themes of Die Ameisenstrasse are the measurement of time and space, the shortage of time and space, alienation from time and space.
The film dwells on stop watches with a dual time-keeping function and on hundreds of other clocks running out of sync. It dwells on the historical gap between two generations, one of which "still takes time" to have meals together (even as death approaches), while the other "is sorry but doesn't have time". It dwells on the meticulously counted time which a statistician takes each day to get from the house to the traffic lights (which invariably turn red as he reaches them), and on the equally precise measurement of the time which his microwave oven takes to heat his dinner each evening. And it dwells on the halting of time when Fate taps the dying man on the shoulder with the words "It's time", on the halting of time perpetuated in stuffed animals, and on the screaming of time as, after three deaths in the house, the camera plunges three times from top to bottom through the watchmaker's shop to zoom in on the watchmaker himself. A time to live (not much), a time to eat (set meal times), a time to die (ample time).
Glawogger subjects space to an equally ruthless critique. The tenement building seems to emanate the familiar, collective cosiness which is conventionally home to the genre. But only at first sight. On closer scrutiny the house emerges as a sinister edifice threatening its residents economically (cf. rent laws and relevant commentaries), psychically (cf. isolation / claustrophobia / manic acquisitiveness) and physically (cf. public safety inspectors / dilapidation / termite infestations). It is a building riddled with cynicism. True: two identical apartments can be switched to alleviate an individual's suffering in the short term. But in the long run it victimises its pathetic, ant-like residents with its vicious spitefulness. It is a monstrous, vigorous, digestive creature that can make fire and water go haywire and relentlessly impels each of its victims (including the self-proclaimed mastermind, Wanecek II, who thought he was safe) towards the final calamity ⎯ while workmen and policemen repeatedly busy themselves with the utterly senseless task of surveying the street in front of the scene of the disaster.
Glawogger's exploration of the time and space dimensions is subtly traced in the film's handling of time and space. But it has a further impact on the action in that it destabilises the characters. This occurs in two ways: in terms of the plot (the humour stops being funny; the paranoia grows oppressive; a fall down the stairs leaves its victim funny in the head; madness becomes rampant; fire brings death), but also in terms of the way we feel about the characters. By the end of the film we have lost our ability to identify with them in the way we had grown accustomed to doing. The figures have, literally, moved away from us, have started to evince traits of character which are bound to worry us because we neither want to claim such traits as our own nor can we confidently claim to be bereft of them (the way identification in the usual sense is supposed to work). Not that the impact of this is a sudden shock. Rather, it is a gradual process, more tragic than comic.
* * *
We take a step backwards, into the Viennese milieu. Midnight in the city of Nestroy (an Epilogue in Heaven, to turn Faust upside down). The closing song goes: ... Angels take forever, assholes go fast. Messrs Freitag, Weinberger and Wanecek II have emerged from the fray drunk as lords, but they have come through. Asked who the new owner will be, Wanecek II mumbles: The next asshole, probably. The ángel exterminador lifts its shiny black wings from the tenement building, making way for the "asshole exterminador", the modern-day, drab, local incarnation of destiny, immobility, catastrophe that is left over when the metaphors run out and culture takes time out. It is on this figure that the next Viennese film needs to focus; a film which will be able to draw not only on the mainstream output of Forst, Hochbaum and Emo, of Cook, Patzak and Novotny (and the short Sturminger films) but also on Die Ameisenstrasse, an admirable experiment in post-modern local comedy.
Alexander Horwath