"I'm not the one who makes the world shocking and unbearable, I just try to show it as it really is."-Ulrich Seidl
The searing, challenging films of Austrian director Ulrich Seidl have rarely been shown in the U.S.; but the critical praise, and controversy, are growing. Documentaries in name only, Seidl's engrossing, often grotesque works draw on eighteenth-century ideals of portraiture, with the artist carefully framing his subjects within the tableaux of their lives to make an aesthetic, narrative point. Often compared to the photographer Diane Arbus (for clinical precision) and the artist Hieronymus Bosch (for hellish imagery), he uses extreme long takes and natural lighting to isolate his protagonists within their often unsettling environments and envelop the viewer in their worlds. Making no apologies for manipulating his images (or his subjects), Seidl avoids the documentary label. "I think my work is very artificial, strongly dependent on carefully constructed imagery," he notes. "I am not interested in simply portraying reality."
Seidl's subjects are more notorious than his aesthetic: isolated, marginalized individuals who seemingly exist between the cracks of conventional society, the forgotten, the avoided, the abused. He makes you share the loneliness and pain of these individuals. Seidl is frequently attacked for shocking, at times obscene images, but at their core such images expose a diseased society. As Dimitri Eipides writes for Toronto Film Festival, "he is documenting social change, exploring how urban loneliness, poverty, and sexuality relate to the penetration of the public into private space." Possibly staged, possibly "real," always riveting, his films question where truth ends and fiction begins, and the divisions - if any - between normal and abnormal, viewer and viewed.
Notes by Jason Sanders.
