We Are Someone Special: The Films of Corinna Schnitt

There is an entire cinematic subgenre defined by the question: How to film the suburbs? The question has been answered with a history of soul-crushing camera movements: lateral tracks which reveal the dehumanizing architecture of repetition, and outward zooms which use environs as a club with which to beat a slowly shrinking individual into submission. But Corinna Schnitt’s work offers a subtly new approach; the filmic vocabulary is the same but the syntax different. Schnitt makes films and videos which find their niche in the space between edits, in the real-time scanning of places and architecture and the people who inhabit them. These people eke out their separate existences in an urbanity seemingly designed to induce sameness; Schnitt’s long takes, like those of her cinematic progenitors, accentuate this design. The difference is that, at the same time, Schnitt’s camera carves out space for these contentedly hapless denizens to call their own.

Between Four and Six / Zwischen vier und sechs (16mm, 1998): The Schnitt family keeps rigorous watch over its hours and days while a camera keeps equally rigorous watch over a hundred homes, any of which could house the Schnitts. But time passes, children grow up, and the two o’clock nap becomes the Sunday coffee… and something more, a weekly family outing in which street signs are polished in an order determined by Dad’s cryptic markings on a city map.

Having already seen the rows of residential regularity within which the Schnitt family presumably makes or made their home, it’s hard not to be skeptical of their contentment in this ritual. Are their excursions merely a state-sponsored activity, exploiting a few humans’ need for tangible togetherness in order to ensure the sparkle of yield signals? Possibly. Seen through Schnitt’s lens, however, the question is essential and inconsequential at the same time: essential because without an answer we have no hope of understanding our own daily actions, and inconsequential because these actions must nevertheless be performed, with or without understanding. People must strive to spend quality time with one another in order to fend off alienation; traffic signs must be clearly visible in order to avoid confusion and mayhem. The idyll between four and six is of questionable motive but of undeniable reality.

There are hundreds of tasks which one must perform regularly in order to be a human in the mutually-agreed-upon sense; each of us chooses different tasks in which to find the most meaning and pleasure. The protagonist of Out of your clothes / Raus aus seinen Kleidern (16mm, 1999) has chosen laundry. There is no part of her life (family and friends, love life and interior design) which is not at least tangentially touched by the freshness of her clothing.

She stands on her balcony, flapping fabric in the wind, each flip of cloth so like the one before it and yet—we must believe—somehow unique, a relief of curls and flutters in a configuration like no other. The laundress continues to work at this garment for an increasingly ludicrous duration, and the camera zooms outward at a creeping pace. She recedes into the background, slowly swallowed by the drab concrete surroundings, hundreds of residences whose tenants may
well be at work finding similarly disproportionate meaning in their own similarly arbitrary tasks of choice.

But Schnitt is the only visible one, and hers the only audible voice.
She shrinks in a manner which according to film convention should be mocking and dehumanizing—but the demeanour of her voiceover as she elucidates her genuine pleasure is so placid and rational that our ears stay with her even as our eyes retreat. The zoom culminates in an unexpected act of cinematic trickery which, merging image and voice, reminds us that two shots can adjoin one another ohne Schnitt (without cuts), and that our inner voice, with all of its compulsions and candor, is even closer than we think.

The voice in Schloss Solitude (16mm, 2002) has only one thing to say– or, rather, to sing: “Ich bin was Besondres / I am someone special”. The phrase is sung repeatedly in a pattern which seems to strain not only against itself but against the definition of the word “pattern”;
it has the aura of musical repetition but remains surprising and unpredictable. It sounds a little different every time… that is,
until one realizes the trick: it’s a six-syllable verse sung within
a five-note phrase, sliding along its phase until every thirtieth event (five six-syllable sentences = six five-note phrases) brings it back home to departure point.

This realization brings us home to a fuller, sadder interpretation of the musico-linguistic text, in which each syllable and each note strives to be an individual, and succeeds at this only through the grace of the system which will ultimately take it away again. And so on: “I am someone special” is each word singing about itself, doomed to repeat, but at least wedded to a different note each time, in a game of musical chairs or chambers.

And “Wir lieben dich / We all love you”, sung in similar phase, is the profession of a faceless phalanx; should one feel unique, being loved so identically by so many? Schloss Solitude is (barring a one-shot prelude) a single reverse tracking shot in which a songstress’s special-ness is given the adoration of the masses, her individuality slowly receding into—but not subsumed by—architectural enclosure.

The Sleeping Girl / Das schlafende Mådchen (16mm, 2001):
A miniature boat cruises down a canal, its motion matched by the camera as it reverses direction: now with the current, now against. Is the camera following the boat, or vice versa? We will never know, for now the recording apparatus has its own trajectory—up and over a vast and seemingly unpopulated tract of suburbia, only to sink again, under the weight of gravity or curiosity, into an open domicile wherein an answering machine message speaks to the solitude, an insurance salesman inquiring after the whereabouts of his most precious pen with a tenacity that borders tragically on the preposterous. That he could harbour such longing for this particular ballpoint, an artifact of mass production if ever there was one, is no more or less absurdly rational and movingly futile than the obsessions of any other of Schnitt’s characters. The only one to hear the salesman’s plea, it seems, is the “sleeping girl” of Vermeer’s painting. And she’s not answering.

Is the sleeping girl herself a reproduction, another unit of mass production? Most likely so; in fact, it’s conceivable that an identical Vermeer print hangs on the analogous wall in each of this area’s homes. On the other hand, she could in fact be the original Vermeer… this question, at any rate, can concern only us. It feels safe to say that such worries, valid though they may be, are not the stuff of which her dreams are made.

Those given to narrative extrapolation could justifiably call The Sleeping Girl a single-take post-apocalyptic movie (in fact, the same could be said of Out of your Clothes). It calls to mind Robert Cormier’s “shortest horror story ever”:

The last person on earth sat in a room.
There came a knock at the door.

Corinna Schnitt’s films are a world of rooms, a world populated by last people. The knocking does not stop. And this is not a happy ending but at least an affirmation that someone is waiting to be let in. It’s comforting to know that Schnitt is out there shaking our freshly laundered insecurities to the wind, absolving our sins with “a little bit of PRIL in some water and a soft cloth”. If this comfort feels tainted by fear or fatalism, it is only because we, identically special by extension and projection, can and must do the same. It could not be otherwise.

Daniel Cockburn
Toronto
October 2003