Corinna Schnitt

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The camera pans slowly through the deserted streets of a middle-class suburb: singlefamily houses with nothing unusual about them, well tended gardens in front, fences, road signs. The voice of a young woman reports on the way her family spent their days when she was a child and how this was characterised by punctuality, exclusion, limitation and conformity.

On vacation in Texas, three women find themselves mysteriously transformed. After crossing the Rio Grande, they make contact with the local cowboys.

A sailing boat is cruising into the wind. The camera detaches itself from the scenery to enlarge the field of vision and pans over a suburb tinged in faded light: a still life of white fences, all absolutely identical, little green lawns and red gabled roofs – just as much models as the miniature schooner. The tranquil progress of the camera over the raster of stereotyped detached and terrace houses presents an artificial idyll dominated by exclusions and norms. Life is only lived here on the soundtrack: wind, bird calls, the sound of a motor muttering in the distance, the noise made by a piece of wheeled luggage being dragged, then a telephone interminably ringing.

The reflections of a young woman on her balcony, shaking her laundry. The private thoughts of this woman are drowned in her own delirium, which is accentuated and framed by the film’s repetitive imagery. The camera slowly zooms out to reveal the urban décor in which the film was made. The anonymous facades of the surrounding apartment blocks push us to imagine that behind each one of these buildings hides a collection of unique lifestyles and thoughts. The artist brings this to light through a strange and almost sad sense of humor.

A woman busily cleans the kitchen, then the stairwell. The recordings from the answering machine can be heard in the background. The concerned landlords pedantically bring up the same issues over and over again: concerns about the contamination of the hallway toilets by strangers or the loss of the basement or toilet keys.

«I’m something special»: a graceful lady in court dress declaims this sentence in the late Baroque interior of Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. A chorus of male voices answers her from the castle stair: «We love you». A monotonous yet grotesque litany is created, that acquires a rather neurotic note in being so repetitious. Reduction to two camera settings, which strictly track the two axes of the Baroque interior, enhances the impression. The prologue is a sequence in which a child, also in court dress, leads the viewer into this absurd scenario. In the end banality breaks into the artificially generated tension as ironic relief.