Throughout this film, the main theme I noticed was of exploitation. Both Olga and Paul are being exploited in some form or another throughout the entire film. Olga is exploited by the hospital she works for, not getting paid what she is owed, and Paul is exploited by his step-father to do work because he owes him money. All of the sex workers portrayed in the film (they were real sex workers if I’m not mistaken) were exploited because they needed that job to get money to survive. In a review of Import/Export in The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw writes “[Seidl’s] film addresses the human costs and human pain that globalisation brings to its migrant workforce, but on this account the conventional liberal-humanist values of compassion, though detectable, are clearly secondary to something far darker: a cinema of cruelty like something by Artaud or De Sade.” I think the way that globalization ties into this film is how both Paul and Olga are forced to travel, to leave their families, in order to find a better life (more money) for themselves. I think the fact that this film was brutally honest (it used real people instead of actors) that it is hard to ignore all of the truths and realities this film presents. Bradshaw also notes that the patients in the care facility Olga works at are real people, and because they are dying and have dementia they really cannot consent to be filmed, and the degradation of that is just truly saddening.
I think that this film is trying to tell us to be content and make the most out of our lives because all there is at the end is death. If you don’t live while you can, just spending the whole time working and being miserable, you are missing the point of life. Olga was let down so many times and she still found the strength to keep going even though her living conditions were terrible and people treated her badly. You have to be happy in whatever situation you are in. I think that also corresponds to The Workingman’s Death, those people had terrible jobs and not very good lives but they saw that they had to make the best of it in order to be happy in their situations. I think that no matter where you are in the world, you might be in an unsavory position but you have to make the best of it because that is what you have to do to survive.
While it seems true that one might have to make the best of whatever situation one finds oneself in--often, perhaps almost always, not based on one's own doing let alone choice--I do wonder whether such a sentiment is not also overly convenient for precisely those forces--which are they?--that might actually be the cause for those miserable situations in the first place. In other words, does the idea that of "amor fati"--embrace your fate--not lead to us acquiescing to our own oppression? Put differently, only because it's a truism that we have to survive--or that we have to work--doesn't mean that all ways of surviving or working are equal, right? For example, as you astutely argue, Pauli and Olga are FORCED to travel, or move. Why? By whom? For what reason? To find a better life? Why can't they find that better life at home? What history, what processes, are at work that prevents them from having such a life and thus forces them to seek it elsewhere? Do the films--Seidl's or any of the others--suggest anything about it? And if not, why not?
This film, as Mary Tompkins observes in her review (http://www.thesamecinemaeverynight.net/ulrich-seidls-importexport-a-movie-for-everyone-who-thinks-michael-haneke-has-gone-soft/), is not entertainment. It is a bucket of ice water thrown in our faces. It forces us to grapple with the cold, harsh realities of de-humanization. The exploitation of women, the less-than-nurturing care of the elderly, the truth of manipulative men, and the lifeless environments in the film show the dark side of humanity with painful clarity. This film shows a humanity stripped of dignity.
I would like to quote from the above cited article on the aesthetics of the cinematography: "...they frame each new location in the story with a pitiless scrutiny, the camera carefully positioned to show how dehumanizing each new space is. The film could be described as a passage through a series of non-spaces that are pure brute functionality, with aesthetics and livability not even a concern. Economically marginalized figures like Olga and Pauli find themselves in one spiritually deadening environment after another, and the way the movie is so finely attuned to these barren 21st-century surroundings is essential to its cumulative effect." All the scenes of the film emphasize this drab starkness, and the film is devoid of aesthetically beautiful shots. The opening scenes in the Ukrainian hospital show an environment that makes one think that this is a terrifying orphan ward where the babies are never held. The white, snowy industrial scene with Olga at the beginning is absolutely barren and almost terrifying in its metaphorical coldness. The horror of the internet sex building and the strict handling of the elderly, the completely de-humanizing scene with Pauli's stepfather using and demeaning a girl that can't yet be out of her teens, all of this scenery speaks of the horror that is pure survival.
This doesn't even end in a pretty way, but in an ominous fading out of the geriatric ward to the music of a senile old woman's repetitious chatter, ending in a chorus of "Tot. Tot. Tot," which is the German word for "death." It leaves the viewers with the same unease in which the movie begins.
This is similar to the starkness of the landscapes in "La Promesse," another film about oppression and de-humanization, from child abuse to the exploitation of the immigrants. This sets the mood for both of these films, but I wonder if the much more colorful aesthetic of "Dirty Pretty Things" may not have had a better effect. That film is also about human exploitation, and get there are some beautiful, colorful scenes. Even the hotel, the greatest place of oppression, is actually quite beautiful. I think that this staging choice better shows the idea that evil is within the beautiful; that things in this world are not what they appear to be, whereas the scenery in the other two films are two predictable; awful things must happen in awful environments. In reality, this is not always the case, as the tragic is often masked in beauty.
However, the message of "Import/Export" shouts in each uncomfortable scene. This film uses things that can be seen as positive aspects of globalization (the internet, for example) as mediums of further globalizing depravity. It also shows that, in spite of the advances globalization, workers are still treated poorly and countries are still trapped in survival mode. Olga leaves her job as a nurse in her own country for what she thinks will be a cleaning job in another country! As the article that I cited above states, this shows the desperation of her situation if a cleaning job is more appealing that a job as a nurse. In spite of globalization, economics still create hostile environments for workers and put them in degrading situations in order to survive.
The issue of aesthetics you gloss brings an interesting conundrum: is it better to allow the audience to take some pleasure in beautiful imagery to allow them to see how evil also occurs there, in the beautiful, or to force audiences to come to terms with horror in by confronting them in a relentless way with that horror, without prettifying it, as it were? This raises, I think, the question of the subject position viewers are put into: as consumers (in the former case) or as wanna-be-consumers, as perhaps in the latter. I.e., it's easier for us to "consume" that in which we take pleasure; that which we don't like we don't tend to consume (as easily). If this is the case (it's an IF), then the next question is: what is, politically, more effective (if the idea is to effect change by getting one's audience to change their thought, their attitudes, their behavior): having an audience that more or less comfortably consumes the images and noting that not everything that's pretty is indeed "good" or having an audience recoil in horror from images they would much rather not have to deal with? Are there additional ways? Is one or the other more honest? Why the need to "package" the horrific (say, oppression, abuse, exploitation) in mainstream aesthetics? Why the need to be "pedagogical" (by, as it were, "teaching" the audience something by forcing us to look at that which we might not look at)? Just some questions to reflect on...
I saw many similarities between Import/Export, La Promesse and Workingman’s Death. This film can be compared to La Promesse in terms of the cinematic aspects – the way it was shot – never showing us things from the character’s viewpoint or showing us the various characters head on. I often found myself questioning what was going on, which I partially attribute to the camera angle but also the subtitles. Something I noticed today while watching this film, and it being the third movie we’ve watched with subtitles, is that it’s often difficult to assess someone’s tone of voice when they’re speaking in a language you don’t understand. Sure, you can read the subtitles but without a tone of voice you’re missing a piece of the puzzle, subtitles don’t offer anything descriptive like you’d find in a book, for instance.
Import/Export was also filmed in those dull, gray colors, like La Promesse that makes everything appear dirty and worn down.
However, there were many scenes in Import/Export that were so absurd and dumbfounding you couldn’t help but laugh (it also talks about this in the New York Times review professor Abel linked), which gave it a completely different feel than La Promesse. In another review from the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw calls it a form of “grotesque realism,” which I think pretty much hits the nail on the head.
Aside from the funny aspects of Import/Export it also (obviously) took a very hard look at the struggle to survive in an environment with little opportunity – just like Workingman’s Death. We witness Olga having to exploit herself through sex work just to get by and then being mistreating at the two jobs she has afterward. Paul also struggles to make ends meet, often having to dodge people because he owns them money and in the one scene getting stripped of his clothes, handcuffed and drenched with beer.
Unlike the workers in Workingman’s Death these two characters can’t really seem to find a steady job, which is what forces them away from their home countries. The fact that Olga has to learn how to say words in another language to perform specific sex acts for people who are obviously of a different background and most likely in another part of the world (being that they speak another language) is globalization in itself. She is offering her services of being a foreign female, complete with accent, in exchange for money from males who are “turned on” by this “foreign-ness.” It’s no secret this actually goes on in real life. In fact, when you think of the stereotypical “mail order” bride it’s usually a Russian or Ukrainian pretty young female. We also see this “marrying for money” or just to survive, aspect when Olga’s co-worker brings up her “on paper husband.” Erich even mentions he’d pay Olga to take care of him and marry her if she takes care of him well enough.
And to clarify the internet sex scenes: the customers--faceless, anonymous, whom we hear only offscreen--speak German. We should also point out that at least in these scenes--as is the case in the scene with Michael, Pauli's step father, and the Ukrainian woman (or still girl?)--the johns appear to get off on their POWER over the women more than by anything else. Recall how the German voice gets increasingly agitated, ultimately shouting at the woman, who has trouble understanding, commanding her in near dictatorial fashion, just as Michael plays the "big man" when demanding the woman to pose, do things, etc. but ultimately doesn't appear able to get an erection, perhaps due to too much alcohol he had previously but perhaps also because, as the film might suggest, the very males who abuse these women are themselves oddly powerless otherwise (if one were to give a perhaps overly Freudian reading of Michael's failure to literally exhibit his "potency" when called upon to do so physically, bodily, rather than merely rhetorically, verbally). One thing one could think through along these lines would be the question of degradation--of whom the film shows being demeaned (and, possibly, of whom the FILM itself demeans): it seems obvious that the women--Olga as well as the other Ukrainian women--are demeaned, at least by their male "customers" and Michael, but what about Michael himself (and possibly even the dis-embodied male voices offscreen)? Could we think of them as being demeaned, degraded, as well-without necessarily suggesting that the degree or kind of demeaning is the same as the one the women as subject to? And, if so, what does the film suggest are the underlying causes for this wholesale degradation people experience in different ways, to varying degrees? And who gets to hold on to some dignity? How so? And what are we to make of it? That dignity is all that matters? If so what do we think of such a bare-bones assertion?
I copied and pasted this from a word doc and accidentally left off the end of it....
I know we aren’t supposed to draw too much on just our opinions but I must say this movie started off slow for me. I found myself having to really try to grasp what was going on and that made me uninterested. However, I believe this “challenge” was intentional. Again, to go back to the New York Times review, Manohla Dargis talks about how there’s “more to movies than escapism.” Dargis alludes to how Import/Export challenges your assumptions, provokes, enrages and inspires you to moral argument, which I found so completely true. This film did challenge me, it was a constant battle for me to grasp what was going on but when I finally did, it was so worth it. And there were parts that kind of made me enraged, such as Michael making the female crawl on the ground like a dog and “woof.” Despite its absurdities and clear portrayal of immorality this has been my favorite film thus far because of how thought provoking it truly was - from the strange scenes of the elderly female who randomly yells “stinks!” to the odd scene of Paul going up to a complete stranger trying to convince him he owes him money, the film definitely strikes different emotions inside of you.
Ulrich Seidl does not make the viewing of Import/Export an easy task to do. I have to agree that this is about exploitation and not merely a film about East and West Europe. In the review posted by Dr. Abel, the author writes about he opening sequence, “no one lives like this, you find yourself hoping, even though you know otherwise.” I believe that western societies know about the bleakness of the living conditions Olga and Pauli are living through without truly grasping how devastating they are. This reminded me of the invisibility aspect we talked about in class. Seidl does not shy away from disturbing the viewer as he tries to show the truth. In an interview about the film, Seidl says regarding the sex scenes, “In order to really move the audience, these scenes need to have enough time. They need duration. The camera must show what is going on with out embellishing anything. The scene also needs duration. If that scene was to last two, rather than ten, minutes it would be a speculative scene instead.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crBKJ6ecrWI)
What I found very interesting was the way this film was presented. We get two different people, two stories. I was wondering when they would ever cross paths. But that never happened in this film. I was in the same situation with Gabrielle regarding the confusion. I was waiting for the two main characters to meet. I found myself wanting to piece together a physical connection between Olga and Paul. Instead, the viewer sees a social connection, which I think speaks a greater volume than a physical one. I believe this gave it more of a documentary feeling than a fiction film. Plus, the usage of actual people was excellent to make it as real as possible. Seidl delved into forbidden worlds that in other films would only give the viewer a quick glance. Like Dr. Abel said in class, films hardly ever show actual work like Workingman’s Death. In Import/Export Seidl purposefully elongates the scenes such as the Internet sex building and at the hospital so the audience can learn about this type of work.
The film starts with the motorists trying to start his motorcycle. It is a long scene, comical in a way. But it sets the tone for the film. As the motorists tries and tries to start his motorcycle to no avail, it is the same for Paul and Olga trying to find jobs in order to survive. They go through many hardships to only be exploited throughout their journey.
The scene of the Ukrainian prostitute being exploited by Pauli’s stepfather was hard to watch. I believe that we can agree that all the films we have watched have the common idea of exploitation being presented in various ways. Is this an inevitable truth of globalization? Are there ways to globalize without the exploiting others? These are the questions that I am constantly asking myself after the screening of each film. The promise of finding a better life in another country seems to resonate throughout the world, but at the cost of exploitation?
A lot of excellent comments and questions. Just to comment on one: "I found myself wanting to piece together a physical connection between Olga and Paul. Instead, the viewer sees a social connection, which I think speaks a greater volume than a physical one." I think this is very good point--that we are forced to think about the SOCIAL connection more so than their physical--or personal--connection. We might keep this thought in mind when watching BABEL. But in general, we might ask whether it is not precisely the SOCIAL component--how we SOCIALLY relate to each other or are made to relate to each other through processes we appear to call globalization--that we often don't think about, or are not encouraged to think about, or, perhaps, are not even allowed to think about (and in many films are not made to think about). If IMPORT/EXPORT indeed effects in the viewer the idea of the SOCIAL--that the protagonists share a SOCIAL connection more than a personal/physical (which they don't) then perhaps we can argue that the film offers an interesting, compelling intervention into how we conceptualize globalization, namely, that it's about processes (social, political, economic) of which we are not in charge but that act upon us, socially, collectively, all the while leading us to prefer to think about this through a logic of individual choice, personalizing the matter, maybe even suggesting that we're all alike in some way (we're all human, etc.), as maybe some other films we have seen or will see could be argued to suggest.
Like many of my other classmates, I feel like a majority of Import/Export has its focus locked upon the exploitation of workers within a globalized economy. As we undoubtedly noticed throughout most of the film, almost all of the action as well as characters are locked into a world that thrives on exploitation, or at least one that cannot escape from it as such. Particularly the audience follows the lives of two individuals. Wherever these characters travel they are both de-humanized as well as exploited to the extent of going to more extreme methods of survival, just like in the film Workingman’s Death as well as perhaps every other film which we have seen.
Without dwelling too long on examples set forth by other students, I do feel like mentioning that nearly every character in the film is under the same sort of oppression, from the two lead roles to even the prostitute near the end of the film. And finally, there is something that should be discussed to the extent what exactly the meaning of “death” at the end of the film might be. Do I know such an answer? I will back away and state that I do not.
But I’d prefer to speak on something that perhaps was less touched on, the camera. While it might have gone unnoticed, a large portion of the film seemed to be only shot with on singular camera, the angle never changing in any scene, giving the entire film a type of documentary feel. The shot are almost always head on, having its angles extremely straight with the scene as everything is framed near perfectly with a room or hallway or vehicle. It was near emotionless. In a sense, it achieves the same effect of La Promesse in terms of placing the audience in an omnipresent character, albeit through a totally different way. We, the audience, are forced to view this scene in such a robotic fashion. Unable to turn away and unable to place or gaze anywhere else, we are forced to view this type of work, oppression, and exploitation caused by the increasing rate of globalization. We are forced and seemingly meant to view this. And just like other students, I too ran across this article, searching through it particularly for this quote which ties in and adds to the pointed mentioned above. “There is a fierce, almost gleeful delight in contriving the most painful spectacle possible, and a laboratory coldness in the way Seidl and American cinematographer Ed Lachman film these grotesque figures in the unsettling white-walled spaces that Seidl finds everywhere, positioning them in symmetrical, rectilinear tableaux, coldly and unforgivingly lit.” In a sense we are forced, but yet also participating in this world, because whether we take this fact to heart or not, this is the world in which we ourselves are a part of. Even in the article in which Professor Abel mentioned is this fact spoken of. “The exactingly framed tableau, at once horrific and yet somehow spookily beautiful, looks so unreal that you might try to persuade yourself that this is science fiction, a vision of some imaginary hell, an aesthetic indulgence. No one lives like this, you find yourself hoping, even though you know otherwise.”
Going off of Monica’s post, I agree with the amount of exploitation being presented in these films. In large part I think this is attributed to not just globalization, but to capitalism in general. Exploitation is what drives capital, and so far the films that have been screened have focused on how people are making (or trying to make) a living wage through labor. David Williams wrote a piece concerning Import/Export that not only brings exploitation to the fore, but also complicates the efforts of visibility that Seidl is striving for throughout the film: http://balticworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/david-williams.pdf Though Williams, despite his attempt to the contrary, actually does create a piece that is “polemically overdetermined,” he appropriately brings up the problematic divide “lowbrow or highbrow…our entertainment or our engagement” (9) that exists within the film because of Seidl’s decision to use the “real” people that has been mentioned for his scenes. As much as I abhor mixing morality with critical analysis, isn’t Williams right to question the legitimacy of a director attempting to demonstrate the atrocities of exploitation…while exploiting people? Does it matter that the woman Michael orders around is actually a prostitute that is performing entertainment as an Eastern European for both Michael and the audience? As Williams points out, her looks of confusion are genuine because Seidl is filming the individual—a prostitute that does not speak the language. Admittedly, Williams takes this argument too far and is so committed to his stance that he becomes flippant towards the counterarguments. Nonetheless, I find it a provocative claim that appears to be unique to this circumstance. It is one thing for a film like Salò to depict its horrors on screen but, in the back of our mind, we know the actors aren’t actually engaging in coprophagia. Granted, Import/Export does not go to the extremes of Salò, but Williams’ argument brings up the ugly realization about the real exploitation that Seidl has captured that I would argue should not be easily dismissed. This also plays into what I would suggest is the key sequence of the film: the party at the geriatric hospital where the patients’ faces have been painted. The scene successfully illustrates the recurring theme throughout the film (and almost all the other films we’ve seen) of self-deception in spite of overwhelmingly bleak conditions. Both Olga and Pauli have their individual and isolated scenes for this occurrence: Olga’s comes when she calls her child to tell him “How wonderful life is” while breaking down crying; Pauli’s occurs during his drunken, blue tinted dance segment (maybe tomorrow a discussion will shed some light on why there is dancing in all of these films…). In both scenes, the characters are desperately trying to force optimism despite their depressing circumstances and environments. This feeling is displayed through the downtrodden faces of the patients with clown makeup painted on, wearing party hats and sitting under colorful ribbons. The cherry on top is the song being sung throughout the scene: “Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed.” While the fates of Olga and Pauli are left ambiguous, the film itself is either endorsing this forgetfulness, or displaying its necessity when faced with such adversity. Either way, Williams’ understanding of the film’s exploitation somewhat mars an otherwise poignant scene, as we must recognize the actuality of these patients—many of whom have some form of dementia so that consent had to be given by the family—being dressed up and painted for the sake of the film.
Not (yet) having read the article you discuss (thanks for finding this), I want to say that I wonder whether moral outrage may not be a cover for what ought to be POLITICAL outrage (which usually is not exhibited by those articulating moral outrage). That said, the question--can one depict exploitation w/o being exploitative--is an important one, and one that's often posed in response to such films. (In an article linked in an earlier post on IMPORT/EXPORT, a comparison to Michael Haneke's films is made: MH's films are almost ALWAYS accused by some critics of relying on the very things he lectures us about.) And given the frequency--indeed, it seems almost an auto-response--of such arguments I can't help but being really suspicious of them. They seem too easy to me... (Of course, I would say this: in my first book, VIOLENT AFFECT: LITERATURE, CINEMA, AND CRITIQUE AFTER REPRESENTATION, I argued that morality (judgment) IS violence, not the antidote to it and argued, via Nietzsche and others, for an A-Moral criticism.)
As for the close-to-last words of the film--“Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed"--I wonder whether we might have to ask: who is the one who forgets (in the film, outside the film), and what is it that gets forgotten (in the film, outside the film)? Isn't it the case that the film itself forces us (how does it do this, cinematically?) to confront that which "we" (who is that?) too often forget: that, say, hiring immigrants to do our dirty work--whether at home or in factories or in hospices etc.--is less an act of benevolence ("we" given "them" work but an expression and assertion of power, economic, social, otherwise?; that it shows us what's "offscreen" in our lives, say, the actual environments from which much internet porn (which none of us, of course, watches, which is why it's only the most successful aspect of the global movie industry...) actually originates (both location and work conditions); or that the film shows us what happens in societies who have lost their traditional family structures due to capitalist (?) operations so that we have to outsource care to anonymous and perhaps often cynical care-institutions where even the caregivers become abusive (perhaps as a means to protect themselves emotionally, perhaps because they're overworked, perhaps because...?)? What makes this lyric even more ironic, I think, is that it's from an Austrian SCHLAGER (for which pop song is an insufficient approximation as a translation)--a schlocky song, usually sentimental, naive, and ultimately terribly conservative in its ideological outlook. Whereas in the song the line is NOT ironic, I think, it seems that in the film its use is meant to be clearly offered as an assault on US: that we only all too happily forget what we can't change, thus not having to think about why it is that we think we can't change whatever it is we think we can't change. The film, it seems to me, demands that we do NOT forget what cannot be changed precisely because it's ethically and politically necessary to refuse the idea that there is anything SOCIAL that cannot be changed.
Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian categorizes Import/Export as a "bizarre, horrifying, challenging work, often brilliant and spectacular, often troubling and indeed objectionable." I personally have to agree with him on all of these fronts. The film is about exploitation and in some ways I felt exploited as a viewer while watching it. The extremely graphic scenes made me feel uncomfortable, and the fact Ulrich makes you stand in the corner while a man parades a young woman around like a dog makes you feel like Paul, the exploited Austrian. I have to admire this style for a number of reasons. Most movies would pull away from a scene such as a woman touching herself and the viewer would take comfort that such a scene would be over soon anyway. However, this never happens. This triggers something in the viewer. We soon have to try and make sense about what is happening. Any viewer has to ask themselves what Ulrich is saying in this moment and I believe he is simply saying, "this is happening." Not a this is happening in the movie, but this stuff happens everyday and no one seems to know or care.
Import/Export also has no music at least none that is scored on top of the film. What music we do get is music played by the characters. This allows us to get a truer sense of who these people are and what their surroundings consist of. The bleak gray snow and old buildings are contrasted with the joy that Olga tries to encourage while dancing with Erich. Music in this case is used as a distraction; for the viewer from the monotony of no score and for the characters from their lives that are rather terrible.
I do not know completely what the film is saying about globalization, but the commentary is in these hard to watch scenes and even the sweet ones. Perhaps the commentary is that we should ask our selves what Monica said she asks herself, "is exploitation an inevitable outcome of globalization?" If this is so, what is the path around it?
The film Import Export is an uncomfortable film that many people try to avoid. This film isn’t a leisure, Friday night movie to go out and enjoy with friends. Most of the scenes are uncomfortable and hard to watch at times. Like what many of you all have said it is painful and rough film to watch all the way through. In an article in the New York Times entertainment section in 2009, Manchla Dargis writes that this film is a “charge of exploitation.” Seidl sets the film in painful and miserable locations that many people try to avoid and not even think about. Everything about this film is focused on exploitation, exploitation on the women, on Olga, on Paul, and on all the poor people who are struggling in the country.
The two main people in the film (Olga and Paul) are trying to survive their tough lives. This is similar to the previous film that we saw, Workingman’s Death. These people are trying to survive and get from this day to the next. Olga and Paul are just trying to make it to the next day.
Another similar aspect of all three of these films is the power that money has over all people who are in trouble and don’t have the means to support themselves. In La Promesse, Roger harbors the illegal immigrants just to get money and then Roger uses this money to threaten the illegals. In Dirty Pretty Things, the power of money is present in the whole organ trade. Juan takes part in this dirty work to get money and uses his money to persuade immigrants that he can get them papers. In Workingman’s Death the workers are living their lives to earn money. Those who have the money are in charge and are looked at to help them. Finally, in Import Export, the people with money controlled all of those who didn’t have any. For example the scene when Paul’s step-father had the woman in his hotel room and was telling what to do and say, he was using his power of money to control all things in the situation.
All of these aspects show globalization in the sense that all people everywhere work hard to survive, and that those who have money have the authority. From the woman in Nigeria in the slaughterhouse who was telling the men how much money the cow was worth, to the step-father in Ukraine demanding the woman to bark like a dog- money has the ultimate power.
A review published by The Guardian summarizes the stance of Import/Export as a film that “addresses the human costs and human pain that globalization brings to its migrant workforce, but on this account the conventional liberal-humanist values of compassion, though detectable, are clearly secondary to something far darker: a cinema of cruelty like something by Artaud” (http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/oct/03/drama.importexport). Caesar the dog’s appearance is a sort of Chekhov’s gun foreshadowing of the dark to come in that one of the films final (and I agree with Monica, hard to watch) scenes involves a foreign (not clear if she was Ukrainian as well) prostitute being forced around by her hair and made to “woof.” Artaud’s commentary on the matter would agree, “it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies... but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free” (1958, p. 79). Daniel J. included a quote very fitting of the film, “‘there is a fierce, almost gleeful delight in contriving the most painful spectacle possible,” and in a case of art imitating life this mindset was most likely shared by the Austrian thug characters during their scenes in the parking garage, .
In Import/Export, unlike Senay’s back story where we assume, we get to see the motivations for Paul and Olga’s journey, a better life. Paul heads East, while Olga leaves what is traditionally thought of as “good” job although low-paying in Olga's situation to move West. The East and West are no doubt symbols on a larger scale, with nanny family’s actions (Johannes cell phone rant, and the family’s inconsiderate treatment of Olga) representing the out of sight, out of mind attitude of the Western world toward “imports.” Olga and Paul’s “search for meaningful, personally fulfilling work,” is reduced to a simple “a fight for dignity, ” explains the reviewer in Times article provided by Dr. Abel, as death awaits us all ( as seen by the passing of Erich). The idea of dignified work was also present throughout Workingman’s Death with each chapter’s occupants struggling to make sense of their purpose with conflicting notions of the past and what is to come in the future.
Seidl’s wide shots seem comparable with Wes Anderson's work (I apologize in advance to the cinephiles in our class, as I am certain there is a better reference on the subject but in the short turnaround time Anderson is who I am familiar with). The stationary wide shots, with the subjects often centered, and framed (loading dock, hospital door frame, living room bookcases, hanging webcam decor) almost boxes the characters in as to imply no escape. In an interview with the Austrian Film Commission, director Ulrich Seidl explains that many of the scenes are “set in public spaces...such as the geriatric ward at Lainz, a hospital in Ukraine, a school for cleaning staff and, in the case of male lead Paul, at the employment office, on an open-air market, and in the subway,” after being questioned about locations and the idea of “society's blind spots.” (http://www.afc.at/jart/prj3/afc/main.jart?rel=de&reserve-mode=active&content-id=1164272180506&artikel_id=1176711851679). However in contrast, this film lacks the color of Anderson films with much of Olga’s life in variations of white (The Ukraine and Austrian hospitals, nanny living quarters, office requiring floor buffering) and Paul with the more grungy, grays.
Artaud, A. (1958). The theater and its double. New York: Grove Press.
I want to pick up something that Gabrielle mentioned in her post: the role of language in Import/Export. She noted the difficulties that attend trying to communicate with someone when you speak a different language, or if you don't speak your interlocutor's language very well. This is the first film in which we see characters struggle to communicate with cross-culturally
Olga's arc mostly bears this out. First, when she engages in sex work via web cam, she has difficulty understanding the commands some disembodied man is giving, and just sort of writhes weirdly while he switches to another language (English in this case; which, side note: at two or three other moments in the film, people switch to English, hoping they'll be understood) screaming in frustration. It's not difficult to imagine that a face-to-face encounter, in which miscommunication took place, might lead to violence.
When Olga is in Austria, we hear her speak broken German, and watch as Austrians treat her with contempt, primarily because the language barrier so clearly marks her as "other". This is perhaps uncomfortably explicit during the scene with that bratty Austrian child.
Paul too, has trouble communicating with Ukrainians because he doesn't speak their language. We see him fail to translate for his stepfather; struggle to pay a bill; it's unclear what he's speaking to the Roma for; ultimately, he's unable to find work, also because of the language barrier.
We've acknowledged that one facet of globalization is the increase of inter-cultural communication--which on a fundamental level means people who speak different languages must interact. Part of what Import/Export sketches out is that language is part of a power dynamic --some languages are more important than others; moreover, the importance of your language is tied to the economic prosperity of your country. Import/Export is brutal precisely because it is unflinching in its depiction of how this dynamic plays out in contemporary Ukraine and Austria
And that at a few moments people--on or offscreen--switch to English might be telling with regard to how English, as a language, is the language of globalization and power....
Sarah's post is very rich. Seidl's cinema is indeed very much a "cinema of cruelty" but, as with Artaud, it's a CRITICAL cinema (i.e., the cruelty serves a critical impetus, though, as per Chandler's comments, one can certainly question the viability of doing so). The reference to Wes Anderson strikes me as useful in purely cinematic terms; it should be noted, though, that his films are clearly very different in content and mood--for one, they don't assault us affectively (which isn't necessarily a critique of his films, just a marker of difference between his and Seidl's use of the same tableaux-vivant framing technique). One of the lessons to learn from such a comparison that any given formal aspect does not contain any given meaning nor does it do any one thing: red doesn't always mean "love" and stationary framing doesn't always create the same spectatorial effects. Form always has to be considered in relation to content or else it's "mere" formalism (itself a critical and aesthetic tradition, one which I find troublesome). Of course i'm not suggesting Sarah is engaging in mere formalism--I just wanted to take her comment as an occasion to foreground the issues I just foregrounded :)
Peter Bradshaw was right when he said "Import/Export is a bizarre, horrifying, challenging work, often brilliant and spectacular, often troubling and indeed objectionable." The film was hard to watch, it forced viewers to see some unfortunate truths about the working class of the world. The most striking part of this film is the fact that the two individuals, Paul and Olga, essentially trade places; hence the movie title. Olga, a nurse, is forced to work as a cleaning lady. She is treated awfully and when things finally start to look up, the source of that light dies. Paul is forced to work in harsh condition with his awful step-father. This film really shows the negative effect that globalization has on the working class.
I found the ending of the movie very interesting. The woman clearly has dementia and she repeats the word "death." Was this supposed to replace the words "the end" or did it signify that in the end all things die. This hospital seemed more like a prison than not and it seems that the only way for these elderly people to escape their prison is death, so they are constantly asking for it. This mirrors what both Olga and Paul are living. They both live in a frozen hell and are forced to work awful jobs to survive. Unlike many movies where the viewer is left feeling hopeful for the characters; it is clear that the only way Paul and Olga will escape their hellish lives is through death.
Although all of this films we have seen so far in class deal with the exploitation of people, none of the films were as bleak as Import/Export. In La Promesse, with all it’s grey industrial buildings, we get a slightly ambiguous ending which nonetheless ends with Igor telling the truth. In Dirty Pretty Things, Okwe and Co. end up turning the tables on Sneaky and flying away. In Working Man’s Death, the film shows relatively happy workers preforming their miserable jobs. These three films all have something hopeful to their outlook of the modern world, but in Import/Export, we get no such thing. This film is as much about desperation as exploitation. Paul is broke, in debt, alone, and in search of “harmony,” which is anything but what he achieves. Ulga is single, a mother, and getting only 30% of wages. Both of these characters find themselves in such desperation that they find they have no other choice but to be exploited. Paul resigns himself to helping out his lousy step-father, whom Paul despises, having to deal with his step-father humiliating the prostitute, which is anything but “harmony.” Ulga has to sexually preform for the webcam, move to Austria, where her skills as a nurse are unacceptable, and she must be a janitor (unskilled vs. skilled labor being a motif throughout this class.) Neither of these characters reach any sort of salvation and perhaps, find themselves worse off than they were before. Paul is alone, without a job, in a land where he doesn’t speak the language. Ulga is alone, where her greatest hope of salvation, Erich, who had promised to marry her and help her live in Austria, dies before this can be achieved. If this movie has a message, its that desperation leads to exploitation which leads to further desperation and further exploitation, and this process repeats this until death. Although this film has aspects of globalization, Import/Export is much more of a European film than a Global film. The Western Europeans look down on the Easterners. The house mother fires Ulga simply because she is Eastern and thus, to the Western Mother, is untrustworthy. Paul’s stepfather, another westerner, exploits the Ukrainian prostitute in an extremely humiliating manner, simply as an exercise to prove his own power. The Nurse in the hospital is also jealous of Ulga’s foreign beauty and disallows her her efforts to be a nurse and ends up fighting with her in a fit of pathetic jealousy. But some of the Easterner’s also have their own misconceptions of Westerners. Such as in the scene when some Gypsies try to haggle Paul into buying a prostitute, trying to convince him to spend 100 Euro, and then try to rob him. Of course, Paul has no money to pay for the prostitute or to get robbed. They just assume that because he is blonde and Austrian, that he must be rich. In fact, nearly all of the inhabitants in that derelict region of Serbia have the same idea, and throng around the Austrian van. Europe is shown as a very divided place, even if there is no longer an “Iron Curtain” between them, with both sides trying to exploit each other.
A good review of the film to get your conversation going: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/movies/31import.html?_r=0
ReplyDeleteThroughout this film, the main theme I noticed was of exploitation. Both Olga and Paul are being exploited in some form or another throughout the entire film. Olga is exploited by the hospital she works for, not getting paid what she is owed, and Paul is exploited by his step-father to do work because he owes him money. All of the sex workers portrayed in the film (they were real sex workers if I’m not mistaken) were exploited because they needed that job to get money to survive. In a review of Import/Export in The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw writes “[Seidl’s] film addresses the human costs and human pain that globalisation brings to its migrant workforce, but on this account the conventional liberal-humanist values of compassion, though detectable, are clearly secondary to something far darker: a cinema of cruelty like something by Artaud or De Sade.” I think the way that globalization ties into this film is how both Paul and Olga are forced to travel, to leave their families, in order to find a better life (more money) for themselves. I think the fact that this film was brutally honest (it used real people instead of actors) that it is hard to ignore all of the truths and realities this film presents. Bradshaw also notes that the patients in the care facility Olga works at are real people, and because they are dying and have dementia they really cannot consent to be filmed, and the degradation of that is just truly saddening.
ReplyDeleteI think that this film is trying to tell us to be content and make the most out of our lives because all there is at the end is death. If you don’t live while you can, just spending the whole time working and being miserable, you are missing the point of life. Olga was let down so many times and she still found the strength to keep going even though her living conditions were terrible and people treated her badly. You have to be happy in whatever situation you are in. I think that also corresponds to The Workingman’s Death, those people had terrible jobs and not very good lives but they saw that they had to make the best of it in order to be happy in their situations. I think that no matter where you are in the world, you might be in an unsavory position but you have to make the best of it because that is what you have to do to survive.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/oct/03/drama.importexport
While it seems true that one might have to make the best of whatever situation one finds oneself in--often, perhaps almost always, not based on one's own doing let alone choice--I do wonder whether such a sentiment is not also overly convenient for precisely those forces--which are they?--that might actually be the cause for those miserable situations in the first place. In other words, does the idea that of "amor fati"--embrace your fate--not lead to us acquiescing to our own oppression? Put differently, only because it's a truism that we have to survive--or that we have to work--doesn't mean that all ways of surviving or working are equal, right? For example, as you astutely argue, Pauli and Olga are FORCED to travel, or move. Why? By whom? For what reason? To find a better life? Why can't they find that better life at home? What history, what processes, are at work that prevents them from having such a life and thus forces them to seek it elsewhere? Do the films--Seidl's or any of the others--suggest anything about it? And if not, why not?
DeleteThis film, as Mary Tompkins observes in her review (http://www.thesamecinemaeverynight.net/ulrich-seidls-importexport-a-movie-for-everyone-who-thinks-michael-haneke-has-gone-soft/), is not entertainment. It is a bucket of ice water thrown in our faces. It forces us to grapple with the cold, harsh realities of de-humanization. The exploitation of women, the less-than-nurturing care of the elderly, the truth of manipulative men, and the lifeless environments in the film show the dark side of humanity with painful clarity. This film shows a humanity stripped of dignity.
ReplyDeleteI would like to quote from the above cited article on the aesthetics of the cinematography: "...they frame each new location in the story with a pitiless scrutiny, the camera carefully positioned to show how dehumanizing each new space is. The film could be described as a passage through a series of non-spaces that are pure brute functionality, with aesthetics and livability not even a concern. Economically marginalized figures like Olga and Pauli find themselves in one spiritually deadening environment after another, and the way the movie is so finely attuned to these barren 21st-century surroundings is essential to its cumulative effect." All the scenes of the film emphasize this drab starkness, and the film is devoid of aesthetically beautiful shots. The opening scenes in the Ukrainian hospital show an environment that makes one think that this is a terrifying orphan ward where the babies are never held. The white, snowy industrial scene with Olga at the beginning is absolutely barren and almost terrifying in its metaphorical coldness. The horror of the internet sex building and the strict handling of the elderly, the completely de-humanizing scene with Pauli's stepfather using and demeaning a girl that can't yet be out of her teens, all of this scenery speaks of the horror that is pure survival.
This doesn't even end in a pretty way, but in an ominous fading out of the geriatric ward to the music of a senile old woman's repetitious chatter, ending in a chorus of "Tot. Tot. Tot," which is the German word for "death." It leaves the viewers with the same unease in which the movie begins.
This is similar to the starkness of the landscapes in "La Promesse," another film about oppression and de-humanization, from child abuse to the exploitation of the immigrants. This sets the mood for both of these films, but I wonder if the much more colorful aesthetic of "Dirty Pretty Things" may not have had a better effect. That film is also about human exploitation, and get there are some beautiful, colorful scenes. Even the hotel, the greatest place of oppression, is actually quite beautiful. I think that this staging choice better shows the idea that evil is within the beautiful; that things in this world are not what they appear to be, whereas the scenery in the other two films are two predictable; awful things must happen in awful environments. In reality, this is not always the case, as the tragic is often masked in beauty.
However, the message of "Import/Export" shouts in each uncomfortable scene. This film uses things that can be seen as positive aspects of globalization (the internet, for example) as mediums of further globalizing depravity. It also shows that, in spite of the advances globalization, workers are still treated poorly and countries are still trapped in survival mode. Olga leaves her job as a nurse in her own country for what she thinks will be a cleaning job in another country! As the article that I cited above states, this shows the desperation of her situation if a cleaning job is more appealing that a job as a nurse. In spite of globalization, economics still create hostile environments for workers and put them in degrading situations in order to survive.
The issue of aesthetics you gloss brings an interesting conundrum: is it better to allow the audience to take some pleasure in beautiful imagery to allow them to see how evil also occurs there, in the beautiful, or to force audiences to come to terms with horror in by confronting them in a relentless way with that horror, without prettifying it, as it were? This raises, I think, the question of the subject position viewers are put into: as consumers (in the former case) or as wanna-be-consumers, as perhaps in the latter. I.e., it's easier for us to "consume" that in which we take pleasure; that which we don't like we don't tend to consume (as easily). If this is the case (it's an IF), then the next question is: what is, politically, more effective (if the idea is to effect change by getting one's audience to change their thought, their attitudes, their behavior): having an audience that more or less comfortably consumes the images and noting that not everything that's pretty is indeed "good" or having an audience recoil in horror from images they would much rather not have to deal with? Are there additional ways? Is one or the other more honest? Why the need to "package" the horrific (say, oppression, abuse, exploitation) in mainstream aesthetics? Why the need to be "pedagogical" (by, as it were, "teaching" the audience something by forcing us to look at that which we might not look at)? Just some questions to reflect on...
DeleteI saw many similarities between Import/Export, La Promesse and Workingman’s Death. This film can be compared to La Promesse in terms of the cinematic aspects – the way it was shot – never showing us things from the character’s viewpoint or showing us the various characters head on. I often found myself questioning what was going on, which I partially attribute to the camera angle but also the subtitles. Something I noticed today while watching this film, and it being the third movie we’ve watched with subtitles, is that it’s often difficult to assess someone’s tone of voice when they’re speaking in a language you don’t understand. Sure, you can read the subtitles but without a tone of voice you’re missing a piece of the puzzle, subtitles don’t offer anything descriptive like you’d find in a book, for instance.
ReplyDeleteImport/Export was also filmed in those dull, gray colors, like La Promesse that makes everything appear dirty and worn down.
However, there were many scenes in Import/Export that were so absurd and dumbfounding you couldn’t help but laugh (it also talks about this in the New York Times review professor Abel linked), which gave it a completely different feel than La Promesse. In another review from the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw calls it a form of “grotesque realism,” which I think pretty much hits the nail on the head.
www.theguardian.com/film/2008/oct/03/drama.importexport
Aside from the funny aspects of Import/Export it also (obviously) took a very hard look at the struggle to survive in an environment with little opportunity – just like Workingman’s Death. We witness Olga having to exploit herself through sex work just to get by and then being mistreating at the two jobs she has afterward. Paul also struggles to make ends meet, often having to dodge people because he owns them money and in the one scene getting stripped of his clothes, handcuffed and drenched with beer.
Unlike the workers in Workingman’s Death these two characters can’t really seem to find a steady job, which is what forces them away from their home countries. The fact that Olga has to learn how to say words in another language to perform specific sex acts for people who are obviously of a different background and most likely in another part of the world (being that they speak another language) is globalization in itself. She is offering her services of being a foreign female, complete with accent, in exchange for money from males who are “turned on” by this “foreign-ness.” It’s no secret this actually goes on in real life. In fact, when you think of the stereotypical “mail order” bride it’s usually a Russian or Ukrainian pretty young female. We also see this “marrying for money” or just to survive, aspect when Olga’s co-worker brings up her “on paper husband.” Erich even mentions he’d pay Olga to take care of him and marry her if she takes care of him well enough.
And to clarify the internet sex scenes: the customers--faceless, anonymous, whom we hear only offscreen--speak German. We should also point out that at least in these scenes--as is the case in the scene with Michael, Pauli's step father, and the Ukrainian woman (or still girl?)--the johns appear to get off on their POWER over the women more than by anything else. Recall how the German voice gets increasingly agitated, ultimately shouting at the woman, who has trouble understanding, commanding her in near dictatorial fashion, just as Michael plays the "big man" when demanding the woman to pose, do things, etc. but ultimately doesn't appear able to get an erection, perhaps due to too much alcohol he had previously but perhaps also because, as the film might suggest, the very males who abuse these women are themselves oddly powerless otherwise (if one were to give a perhaps overly Freudian reading of Michael's failure to literally exhibit his "potency" when called upon to do so physically, bodily, rather than merely rhetorically, verbally). One thing one could think through along these lines would be the question of degradation--of whom the film shows being demeaned (and, possibly, of whom the FILM itself demeans): it seems obvious that the women--Olga as well as the other Ukrainian women--are demeaned, at least by their male "customers" and Michael, but what about Michael himself (and possibly even the dis-embodied male voices offscreen)? Could we think of them as being demeaned, degraded, as well-without necessarily suggesting that the degree or kind of demeaning is the same as the one the women as subject to? And, if so, what does the film suggest are the underlying causes for this wholesale degradation people experience in different ways, to varying degrees? And who gets to hold on to some dignity? How so? And what are we to make of it? That dignity is all that matters? If so what do we think of such a bare-bones assertion?
DeleteI copied and pasted this from a word doc and accidentally left off the end of it....
ReplyDeleteI know we aren’t supposed to draw too much on just our opinions but I must say this movie started off slow for me. I found myself having to really try to grasp what was going on and that made me uninterested. However, I believe this “challenge” was intentional. Again, to go back to the New York Times review, Manohla Dargis talks about how there’s “more to movies than escapism.” Dargis alludes to how Import/Export challenges your assumptions, provokes, enrages and inspires you to moral argument, which I found so completely true. This film did challenge me, it was a constant battle for me to grasp what was going on but when I finally did, it was so worth it. And there were parts that kind of made me enraged, such as Michael making the female crawl on the ground like a dog and “woof.” Despite its absurdities and clear portrayal of immorality this has been my favorite film thus far because of how thought provoking it truly was - from the strange scenes of the elderly female who randomly yells “stinks!” to the odd scene of Paul going up to a complete stranger trying to convince him he owes him money, the film definitely strikes different emotions inside of you.
Ulrich Seidl does not make the viewing of Import/Export an easy task to do. I have to agree that this is about exploitation and not merely a film about East and West Europe. In the review posted by Dr. Abel, the author writes about he opening sequence, “no one lives like this, you find yourself hoping, even though you know otherwise.” I believe that western societies know about the bleakness of the living conditions Olga and Pauli are living through without truly grasping how devastating they are. This reminded me of the invisibility aspect we talked about in class. Seidl does not shy away from disturbing the viewer as he tries to show the truth. In an interview about the film, Seidl says regarding the sex scenes, “In order to really move the audience, these scenes need to have enough time. They need duration. The camera must show what is going on with out embellishing anything. The scene also needs duration. If that scene was to last two, rather than ten, minutes it would be a speculative scene instead.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crBKJ6ecrWI)
ReplyDeleteWhat I found very interesting was the way this film was presented. We get two different people, two stories. I was wondering when they would ever cross paths. But that never happened in this film. I was in the same situation with Gabrielle regarding the confusion. I was waiting for the two main characters to meet. I found myself wanting to piece together a physical connection between Olga and Paul. Instead, the viewer sees a social connection, which I think speaks a greater volume than a physical one. I believe this gave it more of a documentary feeling than a fiction film. Plus, the usage of actual people was excellent to make it as real as possible. Seidl delved into forbidden worlds that in other films would only give the viewer a quick glance. Like Dr. Abel said in class, films hardly ever show actual work like Workingman’s Death. In Import/Export Seidl purposefully elongates the scenes such as the Internet sex building and at the hospital so the audience can learn about this type of work.
The film starts with the motorists trying to start his motorcycle. It is a long scene, comical in a way. But it sets the tone for the film. As the motorists tries and tries to start his motorcycle to no avail, it is the same for Paul and Olga trying to find jobs in order to survive. They go through many hardships to only be exploited throughout their journey.
The scene of the Ukrainian prostitute being exploited by Pauli’s stepfather was hard to watch. I believe that we can agree that all the films we have watched have the common idea of exploitation being presented in various ways. Is this an inevitable truth of globalization? Are there ways to globalize without the exploiting others? These are the questions that I am constantly asking myself after the screening of each film. The promise of finding a better life in another country seems to resonate throughout the world, but at the cost of exploitation?
A lot of excellent comments and questions. Just to comment on one: "I found myself wanting to piece together a physical connection between Olga and Paul. Instead, the viewer sees a social connection, which I think speaks a greater volume than a physical one." I think this is very good point--that we are forced to think about the SOCIAL connection more so than their physical--or personal--connection. We might keep this thought in mind when watching BABEL. But in general, we might ask whether it is not precisely the SOCIAL component--how we SOCIALLY relate to each other or are made to relate to each other through processes we appear to call globalization--that we often don't think about, or are not encouraged to think about, or, perhaps, are not even allowed to think about (and in many films are not made to think about). If IMPORT/EXPORT indeed effects in the viewer the idea of the SOCIAL--that the protagonists share a SOCIAL connection more than a personal/physical (which they don't) then perhaps we can argue that the film offers an interesting, compelling intervention into how we conceptualize globalization, namely, that it's about processes (social, political, economic) of which we are not in charge but that act upon us, socially, collectively, all the while leading us to prefer to think about this through a logic of individual choice, personalizing the matter, maybe even suggesting that we're all alike in some way (we're all human, etc.), as maybe some other films we have seen or will see could be argued to suggest.
DeleteLike many of my other classmates, I feel like a majority of Import/Export has its focus locked upon the exploitation of workers within a globalized economy. As we undoubtedly noticed throughout most of the film, almost all of the action as well as characters are locked into a world that thrives on exploitation, or at least one that cannot escape from it as such. Particularly the audience follows the lives of two individuals. Wherever these characters travel they are both de-humanized as well as exploited to the extent of going to more extreme methods of survival, just like in the film Workingman’s Death as well as perhaps every other film which we have seen.
ReplyDeleteWithout dwelling too long on examples set forth by other students, I do feel like mentioning that nearly every character in the film is under the same sort of oppression, from the two lead roles to even the prostitute near the end of the film. And finally, there is something that should be discussed to the extent what exactly the meaning of “death” at the end of the film might be. Do I know such an answer? I will back away and state that I do not.
But I’d prefer to speak on something that perhaps was less touched on, the camera. While it might have gone unnoticed, a large portion of the film seemed to be only shot with on singular camera, the angle never changing in any scene, giving the entire film a type of documentary feel. The shot are almost always head on, having its angles extremely straight with the scene as everything is framed near perfectly with a room or hallway or vehicle. It was near emotionless. In a sense, it achieves the same effect of La Promesse in terms of placing the audience in an omnipresent character, albeit through a totally different way. We, the audience, are forced to view this scene in such a robotic fashion. Unable to turn away and unable to place or gaze anywhere else, we are forced to view this type of work, oppression, and exploitation caused by the increasing rate of globalization. We are forced and seemingly meant to view this. And just like other students, I too ran across this article, searching through it particularly for this quote which ties in and adds to the pointed mentioned above. “There is a fierce, almost gleeful delight in contriving the most painful spectacle possible, and a laboratory coldness in the way Seidl and American cinematographer Ed Lachman film these grotesque figures in the unsettling white-walled spaces that Seidl finds everywhere, positioning them in symmetrical, rectilinear tableaux, coldly and unforgivingly lit.” In a sense we are forced, but yet also participating in this world, because whether we take this fact to heart or not, this is the world in which we ourselves are a part of. Even in the article in which Professor Abel mentioned is this fact spoken of. “The exactingly framed tableau, at once horrific and yet somehow spookily beautiful, looks so unreal that you might try to persuade yourself that this is science fiction, a vision of some imaginary hell, an aesthetic indulgence. No one lives like this, you find yourself hoping, even though you know otherwise.”
Going off of Monica’s post, I agree with the amount of exploitation being presented in these films. In large part I think this is attributed to not just globalization, but to capitalism in general. Exploitation is what drives capital, and so far the films that have been screened have focused on how people are making (or trying to make) a living wage through labor. David Williams wrote a piece concerning Import/Export that not only brings exploitation to the fore, but also complicates the efforts of visibility that Seidl is striving for throughout the film:
ReplyDeletehttp://balticworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/david-williams.pdf
Though Williams, despite his attempt to the contrary, actually does create a piece that is “polemically overdetermined,” he appropriately brings up the problematic divide “lowbrow or highbrow…our entertainment or our engagement” (9) that exists within the film because of Seidl’s decision to use the “real” people that has been mentioned for his scenes. As much as I abhor mixing morality with critical analysis, isn’t Williams right to question the legitimacy of a director attempting to demonstrate the atrocities of exploitation…while exploiting people? Does it matter that the woman Michael orders around is actually a prostitute that is performing entertainment as an Eastern European for both Michael and the audience? As Williams points out, her looks of confusion are genuine because Seidl is filming the individual—a prostitute that does not speak the language. Admittedly, Williams takes this argument too far and is so committed to his stance that he becomes flippant towards the counterarguments. Nonetheless, I find it a provocative claim that appears to be unique to this circumstance. It is one thing for a film like Salò to depict its horrors on screen but, in the back of our mind, we know the actors aren’t actually engaging in coprophagia. Granted, Import/Export does not go to the extremes of Salò, but Williams’ argument brings up the ugly realization about the real exploitation that Seidl has captured that I would argue should not be easily dismissed.
This also plays into what I would suggest is the key sequence of the film: the party at the geriatric hospital where the patients’ faces have been painted. The scene successfully illustrates the recurring theme throughout the film (and almost all the other films we’ve seen) of self-deception in spite of overwhelmingly bleak conditions. Both Olga and Pauli have their individual and isolated scenes for this occurrence: Olga’s comes when she calls her child to tell him “How wonderful life is” while breaking down crying; Pauli’s occurs during his drunken, blue tinted dance segment (maybe tomorrow a discussion will shed some light on why there is dancing in all of these films…). In both scenes, the characters are desperately trying to force optimism despite their depressing circumstances and environments. This feeling is displayed through the downtrodden faces of the patients with clown makeup painted on, wearing party hats and sitting under colorful ribbons. The cherry on top is the song being sung throughout the scene: “Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed.” While the fates of Olga and Pauli are left ambiguous, the film itself is either endorsing this forgetfulness, or displaying its necessity when faced with such adversity. Either way, Williams’ understanding of the film’s exploitation somewhat mars an otherwise poignant scene, as we must recognize the actuality of these patients—many of whom have some form of dementia so that consent had to be given by the family—being dressed up and painted for the sake of the film.
Not (yet) having read the article you discuss (thanks for finding this), I want to say that I wonder whether moral outrage may not be a cover for what ought to be POLITICAL outrage (which usually is not exhibited by those articulating moral outrage). That said, the question--can one depict exploitation w/o being exploitative--is an important one, and one that's often posed in response to such films. (In an article linked in an earlier post on IMPORT/EXPORT, a comparison to Michael Haneke's films is made: MH's films are almost ALWAYS accused by some critics of relying on the very things he lectures us about.) And given the frequency--indeed, it seems almost an auto-response--of such arguments I can't help but being really suspicious of them. They seem too easy to me... (Of course, I would say this: in my first book, VIOLENT AFFECT: LITERATURE, CINEMA, AND CRITIQUE AFTER REPRESENTATION, I argued that morality (judgment) IS violence, not the antidote to it and argued, via Nietzsche and others, for an A-Moral criticism.)
DeleteAs for the close-to-last words of the film--“Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed"--I wonder whether we might have to ask: who is the one who forgets (in the film, outside the film), and what is it that gets forgotten (in the film, outside the film)? Isn't it the case that the film itself forces us (how does it do this, cinematically?) to confront that which "we" (who is that?) too often forget: that, say, hiring immigrants to do our dirty work--whether at home or in factories or in hospices etc.--is less an act of benevolence ("we" given "them" work but an expression and assertion of power, economic, social, otherwise?; that it shows us what's "offscreen" in our lives, say, the actual environments from which much internet porn (which none of us, of course, watches, which is why it's only the most successful aspect of the global movie industry...) actually originates (both location and work conditions); or that the film shows us what happens in societies who have lost their traditional family structures due to capitalist (?) operations so that we have to outsource care to anonymous and perhaps often cynical care-institutions where even the caregivers become abusive (perhaps as a means to protect themselves emotionally, perhaps because they're overworked, perhaps because...?)? What makes this lyric even more ironic, I think, is that it's from an Austrian SCHLAGER (for which pop song is an insufficient approximation as a translation)--a schlocky song, usually sentimental, naive, and ultimately terribly conservative in its ideological outlook. Whereas in the song the line is NOT ironic, I think, it seems that in the film its use is meant to be clearly offered as an assault on US: that we only all too happily forget what we can't change, thus not having to think about why it is that we think we can't change whatever it is we think we can't change. The film, it seems to me, demands that we do NOT forget what cannot be changed precisely because it's ethically and politically necessary to refuse the idea that there is anything SOCIAL that cannot be changed.
Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian categorizes Import/Export as a "bizarre, horrifying, challenging work, often brilliant and spectacular, often troubling and indeed objectionable." I personally have to agree with him on all of these fronts. The film is about exploitation and in some ways I felt exploited as a viewer while watching it. The extremely graphic scenes made me feel uncomfortable, and the fact Ulrich makes you stand in the corner while a man parades a young woman around like a dog makes you feel like Paul, the exploited Austrian. I have to admire this style for a number of reasons. Most movies would pull away from a scene such as a woman touching herself and the viewer would take comfort that such a scene would be over soon anyway. However, this never happens. This triggers something in the viewer. We soon have to try and make sense about what is happening. Any viewer has to ask themselves what Ulrich is saying in this moment and I believe he is simply saying, "this is happening." Not a this is happening in the movie, but this stuff happens everyday and no one seems to know or care.
ReplyDeleteImport/Export also has no music at least none that is scored on top of the film. What music we do get is music played by the characters. This allows us to get a truer sense of who these people are and what their surroundings consist of. The bleak gray snow and old buildings are contrasted with the joy that Olga tries to encourage while dancing with Erich. Music in this case is used as a distraction; for the viewer from the monotony of no score and for the characters from their lives that are rather terrible.
I do not know completely what the film is saying about globalization, but the commentary is in these hard to watch scenes and even the sweet ones. Perhaps the commentary is that we should ask our selves what Monica said she asks herself, "is exploitation an inevitable outcome of globalization?" If this is so, what is the path around it?
The film Import Export is an uncomfortable film that many people try to avoid. This film isn’t a leisure, Friday night movie to go out and enjoy with friends. Most of the scenes are uncomfortable and hard to watch at times. Like what many of you all have said it is painful and rough film to watch all the way through. In an article in the New York Times entertainment section in 2009, Manchla Dargis writes that this film is a “charge of exploitation.” Seidl sets the film in painful and miserable locations that many people try to avoid and not even think about. Everything about this film is focused on exploitation, exploitation on the women, on Olga, on Paul, and on all the poor people who are struggling in the country.
ReplyDeleteThe two main people in the film (Olga and Paul) are trying to survive their tough lives. This is similar to the previous film that we saw, Workingman’s Death. These people are trying to survive and get from this day to the next. Olga and Paul are just trying to make it to the next day.
Another similar aspect of all three of these films is the power that money has over all people who are in trouble and don’t have the means to support themselves. In La Promesse, Roger harbors the illegal immigrants just to get money and then Roger uses this money to threaten the illegals. In Dirty Pretty Things, the power of money is present in the whole organ trade. Juan takes part in this dirty work to get money and uses his money to persuade immigrants that he can get them papers. In Workingman’s Death the workers are living their lives to earn money. Those who have the money are in charge and are looked at to help them. Finally, in Import Export, the people with money controlled all of those who didn’t have any. For example the scene when Paul’s step-father had the woman in his hotel room and was telling what to do and say, he was using his power of money to control all things in the situation.
All of these aspects show globalization in the sense that all people everywhere work hard to survive, and that those who have money have the authority. From the woman in Nigeria in the slaughterhouse who was telling the men how much money the cow was worth, to the step-father in Ukraine demanding the woman to bark like a dog- money has the ultimate power.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/movies/31import.html?_r=0
A review published by The Guardian summarizes the stance of Import/Export as a film that “addresses the human costs and human pain that globalization brings to its migrant workforce, but on this account the conventional liberal-humanist values of compassion, though detectable, are clearly secondary to something far darker: a cinema of cruelty like something by Artaud” (http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/oct/03/drama.importexport). Caesar the dog’s appearance is a sort of Chekhov’s gun foreshadowing of the dark to come in that one of the films final (and I agree with Monica, hard to watch) scenes involves a foreign (not clear if she was Ukrainian as well) prostitute being forced around by her hair and made to “woof.” Artaud’s commentary on the matter would agree, “it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies... but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free” (1958, p. 79). Daniel J. included a quote very fitting of the film, “‘there is a fierce, almost gleeful delight in contriving the most painful spectacle possible,” and in a case of art imitating life this mindset was most likely shared by the Austrian thug characters during their scenes in the parking garage, .
ReplyDeleteIn Import/Export, unlike Senay’s back story where we assume, we get to see the motivations for Paul and Olga’s journey, a better life. Paul heads East, while Olga leaves what is traditionally thought of as “good” job although low-paying in Olga's situation to move West. The East and West are no doubt symbols on a larger scale, with nanny family’s actions (Johannes cell phone rant, and the family’s inconsiderate treatment of Olga) representing the out of sight, out of mind attitude of the Western world toward “imports.” Olga and Paul’s “search for meaningful, personally fulfilling work,” is reduced to a simple “a fight for dignity, ” explains the reviewer in Times article provided by Dr. Abel, as death awaits us all ( as seen by the passing of Erich). The idea of dignified work was also present throughout Workingman’s Death with each chapter’s occupants struggling to make sense of their purpose with conflicting notions of the past and what is to come in the future.
Seidl’s wide shots seem comparable with Wes Anderson's work (I apologize in advance to the cinephiles in our class, as I am certain there is a better reference on the subject but in the short turnaround time Anderson is who I am familiar with). The stationary wide shots, with the subjects often centered, and framed (loading dock, hospital door frame, living room bookcases, hanging webcam decor) almost boxes the characters in as to imply no escape. In an interview with the Austrian Film Commission, director Ulrich Seidl explains that many of the scenes are “set in public spaces...such as the geriatric ward at Lainz, a hospital in Ukraine, a school for cleaning staff and, in the case of male lead Paul, at the employment office, on an open-air market, and in the subway,” after being questioned about locations and the idea of “society's blind spots.” (http://www.afc.at/jart/prj3/afc/main.jart?rel=de&reserve-mode=active&content-id=1164272180506&artikel_id=1176711851679). However in contrast, this film lacks the color of Anderson films with much of Olga’s life in variations of white (The Ukraine and Austrian hospitals, nanny living quarters, office requiring floor buffering) and Paul with the more grungy, grays.
Artaud, A. (1958). The theater and its double. New York: Grove Press.
I want to pick up something that Gabrielle mentioned in her post: the role of language in Import/Export. She noted the difficulties that attend trying to communicate with someone when you speak a different language, or if you don't speak your interlocutor's language very well. This is the first film in which we see characters struggle to communicate with cross-culturally
DeleteOlga's arc mostly bears this out. First, when she engages in sex work via web cam, she has difficulty understanding the commands some disembodied man is giving, and just sort of writhes weirdly while he switches to another language (English in this case; which, side note: at two or three other moments in the film, people switch to English, hoping they'll be understood) screaming in frustration. It's not difficult to imagine that a face-to-face encounter, in which miscommunication took place, might lead to violence.
When Olga is in Austria, we hear her speak broken German, and watch as Austrians treat her with contempt, primarily because the language barrier so clearly marks her as "other". This is perhaps uncomfortably explicit during the scene with that bratty Austrian child.
Paul too, has trouble communicating with Ukrainians because he doesn't speak their language. We see him fail to translate for his stepfather; struggle to pay a bill; it's unclear what he's speaking to the Roma for; ultimately, he's unable to find work, also because of the language barrier.
We've acknowledged that one facet of globalization is the increase of inter-cultural communication--which on a fundamental level means people who speak different languages must interact. Part of what Import/Export sketches out is that language is part of a power dynamic --some languages are more important than others; moreover, the importance of your language is tied to the economic prosperity of your country. Import/Export is brutal precisely because it is unflinching in its depiction of how this dynamic plays out in contemporary Ukraine and Austria
And that at a few moments people--on or offscreen--switch to English might be telling with regard to how English, as a language, is the language of globalization and power....
DeleteSarah's post is very rich. Seidl's cinema is indeed very much a "cinema of cruelty" but, as with Artaud, it's a CRITICAL cinema (i.e., the cruelty serves a critical impetus, though, as per Chandler's comments, one can certainly question the viability of doing so). The reference to Wes Anderson strikes me as useful in purely cinematic terms; it should be noted, though, that his films are clearly very different in content and mood--for one, they don't assault us affectively (which isn't necessarily a critique of his films, just a marker of difference between his and Seidl's use of the same tableaux-vivant framing technique). One of the lessons to learn from such a comparison that any given formal aspect does not contain any given meaning nor does it do any one thing: red doesn't always mean "love" and stationary framing doesn't always create the same spectatorial effects. Form always has to be considered in relation to content or else it's "mere" formalism (itself a critical and aesthetic tradition, one which I find troublesome). Of course i'm not suggesting Sarah is engaging in mere formalism--I just wanted to take her comment as an occasion to foreground the issues I just foregrounded :)
DeletePeter Bradshaw was right when he said "Import/Export is a bizarre, horrifying, challenging work, often brilliant and spectacular, often troubling and indeed objectionable." The film was hard to watch, it forced viewers to see some unfortunate truths about the working class of the world. The most striking part of this film is the fact that the two individuals, Paul and Olga, essentially trade places; hence the movie title. Olga, a nurse, is forced to work as a cleaning lady. She is treated awfully and when things finally start to look up, the source of that light dies. Paul is forced to work in harsh condition with his awful step-father. This film really shows the negative effect that globalization has on the working class.
ReplyDeleteI found the ending of the movie very interesting. The woman clearly has dementia and she repeats the word "death." Was this supposed to replace the words "the end" or did it signify that in the end all things die. This hospital seemed more like a prison than not and it seems that the only way for these elderly people to escape their prison is death, so they are constantly asking for it. This mirrors what both Olga and Paul are living. They both live in a frozen hell and are forced to work awful jobs to survive. Unlike many movies where the viewer is left feeling hopeful for the characters; it is clear that the only way Paul and Olga will escape their hellish lives is through death.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/oct/03/drama.importexport
Although all of this films we have seen so far in class deal with the exploitation of people, none of the films were as bleak as Import/Export. In La Promesse, with all it’s grey industrial buildings, we get a slightly ambiguous ending which nonetheless ends with Igor telling the truth. In Dirty Pretty Things, Okwe and Co. end up turning the tables on Sneaky and flying away. In Working Man’s Death, the film shows relatively happy workers preforming their miserable jobs. These three films all have something hopeful to their outlook of the modern world, but in Import/Export, we get no such thing.
ReplyDeleteThis film is as much about desperation as exploitation. Paul is broke, in debt, alone, and in search of “harmony,” which is anything but what he achieves. Ulga is single, a mother, and getting only 30% of wages. Both of these characters find themselves in such desperation that they find they have no other choice but to be exploited. Paul resigns himself to helping out his lousy step-father, whom Paul despises, having to deal with his step-father humiliating the prostitute, which is anything but “harmony.” Ulga has to sexually preform for the webcam, move to Austria, where her skills as a nurse are unacceptable, and she must be a janitor (unskilled vs. skilled labor being a motif throughout this class.) Neither of these characters reach any sort of salvation and perhaps, find themselves worse off than they were before. Paul is alone, without a job, in a land where he doesn’t speak the language. Ulga is alone, where her greatest hope of salvation, Erich, who had promised to marry her and help her live in Austria, dies before this can be achieved. If this movie has a message, its that desperation leads to exploitation which leads to further desperation and further exploitation, and this process repeats this until death.
Although this film has aspects of globalization, Import/Export is much more of a European film than a Global film. The Western Europeans look down on the Easterners. The house mother fires Ulga simply because she is Eastern and thus, to the Western Mother, is untrustworthy. Paul’s stepfather, another westerner, exploits the Ukrainian prostitute in an extremely humiliating manner, simply as an exercise to prove his own power. The Nurse in the hospital is also jealous of Ulga’s foreign beauty and disallows her her efforts to be a nurse and ends up fighting with her in a fit of pathetic jealousy. But some of the Easterner’s also have their own misconceptions of Westerners. Such as in the scene when some Gypsies try to haggle Paul into buying a prostitute, trying to convince him to spend 100 Euro, and then try to rob him. Of course, Paul has no money to pay for the prostitute or to get robbed. They just assume that because he is blonde and Austrian, that he must be rich. In fact, nearly all of the inhabitants in that derelict region of Serbia have the same idea, and throng around the Austrian van. Europe is shown as a very divided place, even if there is no longer an “Iron Curtain” between them, with both sides trying to exploit each other.