Ulrich Seid. In the Basement

Following his large-scale PARADISE trilogy, Ulrich Seidl's latest film essay Im Keller (In the Basement) is due to be released in autumn 2014. It is the director's return to the documentary film. Im Keller (In the Basement) is a nightmare journey through the depths of the Austrian soul: it is about brassband music and opera arias, expensive furniture and sleazy jokes, sexuality and sadism, fitness and fascism, snakes and weapons, love and the yearning for it. This accompanying book intends to draw attention to the specific aesthetics and social dimension of Seidl's tableaux with the help of film frames and texts. Selected motifs of this tour through the basement of a typical Austrian family home communicate with texts by film critics, philosophers, psychologists, authors and essay writers, shedding light on subterranean secrecy.