Josef Dabernig has been active as a filmmaker more or less since this journal was founded. The 13 short films he has made so far generally circle around condensed, seemingly erratic scenarios that cannot be deciphered readily at first glance. In these films social, interpersonal interlinkages are often shaped by incompatibilities, whilst at the same time anachronistic-looking locations also play a central role. In this interview Dabernig talks about his working methods and about the concentrated nature of his works, the most recent of which – »Hypercrisis« – was nominated for the European Film Prize in 2011 at the Venice Film Festival and won the Innovative Cinema Award at the 2012 Diagonale Graz.

Christian Höller: The first point that should be mentioned with reference to the question »Enduring Value?« is that you often work with historic residues in your films. This is manifested in a whole host of very different forms: in »Herna« it is most relevant for the sound track, a radio play by Bruno Pellandini, which transports us to the milieu of the old landed aristocracy. In »Hypercrisis« it is the setting, a filmmakers’ rest home from the late Soviet era. What status do these historical ruins have for you? Are these powerful influences that are simply impossible to shake off, or do you explore these issues out of an active interest in them?

Josef Dabernig: I do of course have an active interest in them, although I think that a number of aspects converge here. I like to describe my films as »extended sculptures« –architecture, space, photography, and indeed text too, enter into a symbiosis, which I think continues to function analytically. In »Herna«, to take a case in point, two completely unrelated narratives are juxtaposed. The way I choose the settings is best explained by talking about a kind of ritual of mine: I photograph football pitches in many places that I visit, always following the same choreography. The sports grounds are almost never new, but are generally in the throes of transformation. In the case of the rest home in the Caucasus, we had to hurry, as it was already being redeveloped – as can be seen in the film – and no longer exists in a form that interests me.

Höller: The collision of various systems is a motif in many of your works. It appears on several levels in »Hypercrisis«. One of these is the institutional setting, with various »white coats« sitting around, enjoying a good meal. The nebulous figure of the artist stands in counterpoint to these characters. Very striking signature music is associated with each of these two levels: Verdi’s »Requiem« for the »white coats« and a work by Can in the case of the artist. Is this dichotomy between the systemic and the individual in some way decisive for you, or should this collision be viewed instead as a kind of ironic wink to the audience?

Dabernig: I thought at some length about how I could describe the value of my works with reference to »Enduring Value?«. On this point, I would like to quote a sentence that was written about one of my films when it was shown in the context of several works in a group exhibition: »And finally a work by Josef Dabernig that is incredibly devoid of meaning.« Irrespective of how this phrase was meant, I actually really like this characterisation, as the meaning is never entirely clear in my films and there is thus enormous permeability in how they can be read. In another context it has been asserted that I still think in terms of oppositions, which is allegedly entirely anachronistic in an era of hybrid constructions. However, as my films are constructed on the basis of antagonisms, from that perspective they do perhaps have an old-fashioned touch to them.

Höller: To pick up on one of these oppositions: the artists’ rest home in »Hypercrisis«, or what remains of it today, was a reality of the Soviet era. The plot set there, showing an artist in the throes of a creative crisis, is a fiction that you have superimposed upon this past reality. Does this opposition play a role in your films? The actors – most of them familiar from the Austrian or international art world – often play themselves, although they also always fill certain roles. What is the status of this opposition, or are these contradictions perhaps increasingly blurred in your films?

Dabernig: The construction of the narrative is dreadfully banal in terms of the oppositions it utilises. However that is intentional and might perhaps be seen as a tried-and-tested means of obtaining funding. I did however stop short of using the location as a rest home for filmmakers in the film – that would have been blatantly redundant. That meant I had to create a new function for this place. I often take decisions on the content reflexively. However, the overall construction and its details are worked out consciously – right down to the level of the editing, the movement, in other words, the way in which the individual components are combined.

Höller: »Hypercrisis« addresses the paradoxical situation of art under Communism in a somewhat eccentric and perhaps also ironic fashion. On the one hand, artists were looked after, with rest cures and psychological support on offer – filmmakers really did travel to this home to recuperate. On the other hand, this went hand-in-hand with pressure to produce art closely linked to the state and in conformity with the system. Has today’s art practice really left all that behind, or do we still – perhaps unconsciously – continue to drag remnants of that around with us?

Dabernig: Structures that could be described as care and support mechanisms certainly do exist. These are, however, comparatively modest and in this case I made the film by putting a considerable sum into the production myself. That means I unfortunately cannot describe myself as an artist receiving care and support. My art practice does not engage actively with institutional framework and the constraints that determine provision of support; in my view the value of a work consists instead in its formal and substantive concentration. I generally work on the basis of associations in developing the level of the meaning in my works. However that is not enough on its own, for I take the relevant decisions from shot to shot and from edit to edit. In other words: an interesting location or an intriguing motif does not necessarily give rise to a work of real substance.

Höller: Music plays a highly concentrated, and indeed active, role in »Hypercrisis«. What led you to associate the institution with Verdi’s »Requiem« and to ascribe music by Can, who in a sense is the quintessence of Krautrock from the early 1970s, to the crisis-ridden figure? Is this also linked to particular historical codifications?

Dabernig: It is all material for me; I don’t raise detailed questions about it. In any event there is no religious backdrop to my use of Verdi’s »Requiem«. The section I selected is particularly slow and I felt that it provided the right musical correspondence to what was happening in the rest home. I wanted to have confusing, disturbing music for the poet. I thought at first about using a piece by Kaliber 44, a Polish hip-hop band. The question of rights is however always a tricky issue when it comes to music. Meanwhile Christoph Tannert had invited me to a Can exhibition in Germany and I was convinced that I would have no trouble obtaining the rights to a Can song. It turned out I was wrong about that. The whole process was complicated and for the time being I have had enough of using original music by contemporary artists.

Höller: Isn’t it quite a leap from Polish hip-hop to Can?

Dabernig: I don’t think so, at least not in structural terms. I was interested in contrasting two music genres, and this contrast worked with either of these pieces of music.

Höller: An entirely different form of social difference plays a role in »Herna«; the »lower class«, in search of immediate gratification, for example in those betting and gaming shops that are shooting up all over the place nowadays, is contrasted with a certain type of nobility, represented only on the soundtrack. This artistic invention addresses aristocrats and the nobility, who define themselves primarily though their family background, their assets, perhaps also through their artificial language and expressions, which often verge on the ridiculous. To what extent are these two levels intermeshed? Or is the focus rather on an insurmountable divide?

Dabernig: The main element is a certain degree of confusion. In »Herna« quite some time elapses before it becomes apparent how it all functions. In principle the structure of two unconnected parallel narratives functions like a zip. At the start a car door is slammed both in the image and on the sound plane. I deliberately superimposed the doors to create a semblance of synchronicity. After that however the two levels diverge. I had already worked with author and playwright Bruno Pellandini for the film »Rosa coeli« in 2003, and the monologue he wrote for that project, present as a voice-over by Branko Samarovski for the film, was a significant step in broadening my dramaturgical vocabulary. In »Herna«, Pellandini’s radio play with its accentuated theatricality in a sense goes one better in appropriating a cultural stratum that is essentially alien to me.

Höller: Did the visual and the aural plane develop in parallel? Or were there specific motifs that were present before everything else?

Dabernig: The initial spark came from something I experienced on a cold winter day in the Prater. I walked past a car, which was parked with its engine running – which piqued my curiosity – and noticed that there was a young woman with a small child sitting inside the vehicle. Two hours later, after watching a football match in a betting shop, I saw the woman and child still sitting in the same car with the heating on. That made me start speculating about how long they would go on sitting there. Perhaps the husband was gambling away his money in the betting shop all the while. In any event, the image stayed with me, and I looked for a way to express it that went beyond the format of a social drama. Around the same time, Bruno Pellandini told me that he knew someone who had just bought his fourth castle, just like that, not as a calculating investor but more or less as a collector. The two elements came together for me and I asked him if he could write a text on the topic. I realised that these two elements would not get along easily. Pellandini agreed with the rules of the game for my use of his text and that’s how this montage came about.

Höller: If we consider only the images, portraying a really rather desolate location in Moravia, the film is highly reminiscent of Neorealismo. In contrast, on the sound plane we hear very distinguished, eloquent speech, recorded by professional actors. Were you aiming via the montage to remove a little of the »singularity of perspective« of these two levels by confronting each with something entirely different?

Dabernig: I think that my interest in combining incompatible elements is more ludic, perhaps also more personal. I work in the realm between feature films in miniature and experimental film, and in that context this kind of thing occurs to me from time to time.

Höller: The differences that become apparent through this contraposition are particularly striking in the film. The gambler leaves the woman and child sitting in the car until the very end – a static state that persists right to the end. Even purely on this mini-narrative level, the film refuses to provide us with any kind of cathartic element. In contrast, a series of caesurae are incorporated into the radio-play level, and you could say that there is something highly constructed and fragile about the social cohesion staged there.

Dabernig: My only stipulation to the play’s author was about how long it should be, and I later asked him to divide it up into segments for the film. I didn’t intervene in the content. We did discuss a couple of sentences, but essentially I accepted the material as it stood. However, I did have to get used to it at first. But the fact that it all seemed so very alien to me was exactly what I found interesting. Looking at it in that light, the concept was rooted in a coercive logic, which was followed through in the completed work. The radio play does in a sense draw to a conclusion, whilst the feature film does not.

Höller: On the question of coercive logic: what emerges very clearly in »Herna« as a whole is a certain mechanistic monotony. In the male character in particular this is concentrated as a foolish obsession inherent to his pursuit of a fast buck. Although the film is already two years old, in the light of the current crisis one wonders if perhaps the only remaining alternative is chasing after happiness like this, monotonously and mechanistically.

Dabernig: This figure certainly has no room to manoeuvre at all. At the same time however that opens up greater leeway for me. I take an interest in gambling, just as I also follow the stock market. Both are signifiers for the life that we lead. When we start addressing integration into a value system, this metaphor, on the other hand, brings ethical values to light. That leads me back once again to an idea that is enormously important to me – concentration.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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