Living a Beautiful Life

Video, 2004

 aufgenommen auf MiniDV, verfügbar als Digibeta und DVD, Farbe, Ton | shot on MiniDV, 13 min (Filmversion oder or Loop) Format: 4:3 Sprache: Englisch und Englisch mit dt.Untertiteln

Mehr InformationRegie: Corinna Schnitt
Schauspieler: Diana Imber, Michael Gianelli Found
Footage (1 min): Der Katzenprinz, DDR | GDR: DEFA, 1978
Kamera: Philipp Lachenmann
Assistenz: May Rigler
Grip: Philipp Schmitz
Produktionsmanager: Detlef Issel
Catering: Doreen Morrissey
Maske: Anca Munteanu-Rimnic
Preproduktion: Isabell Spengler
Standfotografie: Maximilian Canepa
Tonmischung: SoundVision Köln
Produziert mit freundlicher Unterstützung:
Villa Aurora und Harriet Selling, Los Angeles

Synopsis

Ein geschmackvolles Haus in traumhafter Lage, ein gut aussehender Mann, eine attraktive Frau, beide jung und sportlich, die von ihrem Leben und ihren Zukunftswünschen erzählen. Allem Anschein nach präsentiert sich hier ein gut situiertes, glückliches Paar – gäbe es da nicht hin und wieder Momente, in denen Unstimmigkeiten zwischen ihrem selbstsicheren Auftreten und ihren Äußerungen spürbar werden. Corinna Schnitt hat diesem perfekten Paar Worte aus Interviews mit kalifornischen Jugendlichen in den Mund gelegt, die sie über ihre Vorstellungen von einem schönen Leben befragt hat. Die dargebotene Idylle erweist sich als ebenso durch und durch inszeniert wie das den Film beschließende Panorama der paradiesischen Unschuld aus einer DEFA-Produktion, in dem nackte Kleinkinder zusammen mit Tierbabys auf einer grünen Wiese spielen. Das schöne Leben, das hier vor der Kamera ausgebreitet wird, und seine beiden Protagonisten sind Ausgeburten der Zukunftsträume von Heranwachsenden. Die heile Welt ist eine Fiktion, die den ihrerseits durch Fiktionen und Klischees genährten Vorstellungen der Teenager von beruflichem Erfolg, von familiärem Glück und von einer perfekten Gesellschaft entspringt: Fiktion spiegelt auf Fiktion zurück. Das perfekte Glück trägt beklemmende Züge.

Barbara Filser

Pressetext, Galerie Olaf Stüber, 13.9.-18.10.2003

„ Stell dir ein Leben vor, wie du es als Kind schon erträumt hast? Also, ein perfektes Leben.

Scheinbar vollkommen naiv nimmt Corinna Schnitt das allgemeine Wünschen und die üblichen Vorstellungen vom Lebensglück beim Wort – und führt uns diese als quasidokumentarische Inszenierung erbarmungslos vor Augen und Ohren. Sie zeigt uns eine Frau und einen Mann, beide gutaussehend, die in einer stilvollen Villa hoch über Los Angeles wohnen und abwechselnd in die Kamera berichten, dass sie all das haben und all das sind, was sich andere nur ersehnen. Wie „Blade Runner“-Replikanten zählen sie sämtliche Bestandteile eines traumhaft schönen Lebens auf, so wie es sich die Menschen, zumindest in der westlichen Welt, gemeinhin vorstellen. Der Zuschauer kann diese erschöpfende Litanei des totalen Glücks nur schwer ertragen und fühlt sich durch die kontemplative Stimmung der wohl-komponierten Szenen zusätzlich provoziert. Und wer zwischendurch vermutet, dass am Ende alles explodieren muss wie in Antonionis „Zabriskie Point“, der irrt. So grotesk dieses Schwelgen in Beautiful-Klischees auch anmutet, Corinna Schnitt ist weit davon entfernt, eine simple Parodie abzuliefern und verzichtet auf Effekt-gehasche und Pointentümelei. Sie beherrscht die dramaturgisch wirkungsvolle Methode, Artifizielles und Naturalistisches auf subtile Weise ineinander zu verweben. Ein Merkmal, das Schnitts präzise Filmarbeiten grundsätzlich auszeichnet: Sie überlässt uns – vielleicht sogar ein bisschen schadenfroh – einer irritierenden Mehr-deutigkeit, die für eine mal amüsante, mal unbehagliche Dechiffrierungs-Schwebe sorgt. In ihren seltsamen ethnologischen Fiktionen entdeckt sie gerade dort Para-realitäten, wo wir doch alles genau zu kennen glauben. Und so zieht sie uns beim Betrachten ihrer kaum bewegten Bilder ganz sanft und sehr freundlich den Boden unter den Füßen weg.

Kay von Keitz

FilmtextDer Text basiert auf Schülerstatements zu der Frage: ”How do you imagine a beautiful life?”

wife:

”I am happy. When you‘re happy everything is beautiful, lighter. Everyone wants a lot of things, but it´s because it makes them happy. My life is simple because it‘s the little things that are the most important. For example I love to sing, I love to hear and play music everywhere I go, in the car, when I wake up, etc. I start singing a song and my husband joins in and sometimes we sing a duet complete with harmony.”

husband:

”I‘m a fighter pilot with the US Navy abroad the USS AbrahamLincoln. I‘m the best fighter pilot and I fly the F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet. I have a beautiful wife she is very intelligent and has a great sence of humor. I also have two kids. We got a happy family and I‘d say that we live a pretty fulfilling life. Eventually I ‘d like to retire from the navy and become a scientist. I consider myself a model citizen and my family attends church every week. We live in a mansion with the view of the ocean. I don’t have any debt or even a mortage on the house. I‚m soon planning to buy my mother a house. The weather is beautiful, just perfect, always sunny. I often like to travel to Europe and I only eat the finest foods.“

wife:

„I have a cute husband, a lot of kids and we all are truly happy. We have a nice little family, we all get along together and we have a close inner bond. We live in a mansion surrounded by fields of grass plus we have flowers and forests. Other people live outside the forest as well, but not too many. The house is just outside the city so that we can live a calmer day to day life, but close enough to the city that we can still go out. In the winter it snows and there is a lake nearby. Deer sometimes come out onto the fields of grass. It ‘s a quiet place, a nice place, I feel perfectly safe even when I‚m taking a walk all by myself on the streets even in the middle of the night.“

husband:

„We have a maid who works in the house, she does the cooking and cleaning, we just don´t have the time. We both have our careers. We also have a gardener who takes care of our cactus garden. We make enough money for extra stuff, like cars, sports-events, dogs and summerhouses. In the summertime we vacation on a remote, just a beautiful remote island, where the peaceful atmosphere consumes all the stress and leaves us relaxed. I’m not weighed down by my responsibilities. We are all healthy, because of our healthy way of living. I don´t have an ounce of tension in my body. I work out three times a week, often going jogging along the beach with my dogs.“

wife:

„We both have carreers and we have a large home and lot‚s of cars. We spend the day working and in the evening we do fun things like watching TV or reading. I have lot’s of friends, who I speak to all the time, because I often call them on the cellphone. Sometimes I get so busy I don‘t get to see them as often as i like but it‘s nice to know how they are doing and what they are up to.“

husband:

„Every once in a while I like to be surrounded by beautiful and sexy women, put together well, because it’s nice to have a change. Oh, it’s nothing very serious. My wife, she is very sexy and she works hard at it, so I can´t complain. I enjoy having a mistress, a hot mistress every few months and then it’s over. It‘s important to have something to look forward to everyday, but I like to keep my routine consistent. I’m a very successful person and I know I’m contributing to the world. My life is fulfilling and when my time comes to go, I have no fear of death and no worry about any unsettled accounts.“

wife:

„I have nice cothes, I enjoy some luxuries, especially our two beautiful dogs. We have a nanny to take care of our son and our daughter. They go to private school, so we can make sure they get the best education possible. They are both beautiful and intelligent children, who I hope never grow up. I don´t worry about my husband leaving me for another woman. I don‘t look old, will never look old. I’m a self-independent, strong, focused woman.“

husband:

„This is a safe area, it´s a safe enviroment. There are no murders, no rape. People have nice homes and the streets are clean. There are no distinctions between the social classes and races.“

wife:

„I think our lives are perfect, nobody is suffering and there is no pollution. Everyone is fit and pleased with themselves, everyone is treated equally and there is plenty of freedom and love and perfect harmony for everyone.“

Living a Beautiful Life

Video, 2004

shot on MiniDV, available on Digibeta and DVD, colour, sound, 13 min (Filmversion or Loop) Aspect Ratio: 4:3 Language: English and English with german subtitles

More InformationDirector: Corinna Schnitt
Actors: Diana Imber, Michael Gianelli
Found Footage (1 min): Der Katzenprinz, DDR | GDR: DEFA, 1978
Camera: Philipp Lachenmann
Assistant: May Rigler
Grip: Philipp Schmitz Production
Manager: Detlef Issel
Catering: Doreen Morrissey
Make-up: Anca Munteanu-Rimnic
Preproduktion: Isabell Spengler
Stillfotography: Maximilian Canepa
Soundmix: SoundVision Köln Produced with generous support:
Villa Aurora and Harriet Selling, Los Angeles

Synopsis

A stylish villa in beautiful surroundings, a handsome man, an attractive woman, both young and trim, talking about their lives and their wishes for the future: To all appearances a happy, well-off couple presents itself – if it weren’t for those brief moments, where a strange inconsistency between the self-assuredmanners and their wordsmakes itself felt. Corinna Schnitt has her perfect couple voice ideas of a beautiful life taken frominterviews with Californian teenagers. The presented idyll reveals itself as thoroughly staged, as is the closing panorama of paradisiacal innocence, a shot froma DEFAmovie showing naked children and cubs playing together. The beautiful life that is presented in front of Schnitt’s camera and its two protagonists embody teenagers’ dreams of the future; this ideal world is a fiction, which arises fromyoung people’s ideas about a successful career, ideal family life, and a perfect society, themselves in turn influenced by fictions and stereotypical representations: Fiction reflects back upon fiction, perfect happiness, as presented here, has something alarming about it.

Barbara Filser

Presstext, Galerie Olaf Stüber, 13.9.-18.10.2003

Imagine a life you always dreamed of as a child? A perfect life.In a way that seems entirely naïve, Corinna Schnitt takes the common wish and the usual notion of a happy life literally, and then presents them mercilessly before our eyes and ears in a quasi-documentary setting. It shows a woman and a man, both good-looking, who live in a tasteful villa high above Los Angeles, reporting alter-nately to the camera that they own all the things about them, and that this is what others can only dream of. Like Blade Runner replicants, they list all the components of the beautiful life, at least as it is imagined in the Western world. The spectator is only barely able to take this exhausting litany of total happiness, and feels himself further provoked by the contemplative mood of these well-composed scenes. And if in the meantime you think that everything will explode at the end, like in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, you’re wrong. As grotesque as this wallowing in cliches of the beautiful might seem, Corinna Schnitt goes far beyond simple parody, and refuses to use cheap effects or to make easy points. She is a master of the dramaturgically effective method of subtly weav-ing together the artificial and the naturalistic. This is a fundamental aspect of Schnitt’s film work: she leaves us—perhaps even with a bit of malicious pleasure––with an irritating ambivalence, which insures an undecidedness that is in one moment amusing, then disconcerting. In her strange, ethnological fictions, she uncovers para-realities just where we thought we already knew it all, and thus very gently and very friendly pulls the floor from beneath our feet while we watch these barely moving images.

Kay von Keitz

FilmtextThe text is based on teenager statement to the question: ”How do you imagine a beautiful life?”

wife:

”I am happy. When you‘re happy everything is beautiful, lighter. Everyone wants a lot of things, but it´s because it makes them happy. My life is simple because it‘s the little things that are the most important. For example I love to sing, I love to hear and play music everywhere I go, in the car, when I wake up, etc. I start singing a song and my husband joins in and sometimes we sing a duet complete with harmony.”

husband:

”I‘m a fighter pilot with the US Navy abroad the USS AbrahamLincoln. I‘m the best fighter pilot and I fly the F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet. I have a beautiful wife she is very intelligent and has a great sence of humor. I also have two kids. We got a happy family and I‘d say that we live a pretty fulfilling life. Eventually I ‘d like to retire from the navy and become a scientist. I consider myself a model citizen and my family attends church every week. We live in a mansion with the view of the ocean. I don’t have any debt or even a mortage on the house. I‚m soon planning to buy my mother a house. The weather is beautiful, just perfect, always sunny. I often like to travel to Europe and I only eat the finest foods.“

wife:

„I have a cute husband, a lot of kids and we all are truly happy. We have a nice little family, we all get along together and we have a close inner bond. We live in a mansion surrounded by fields of grass plus we have flowers and forests. Other people live outside the forest as well, but not too many. The house is just outside the city so that we can live a calmer day to day life, but close enough to the city that we can still go out. In the winter it snows and there is a lake nearby. Deer sometimes come out onto the fields of grass. It ‘s a quiet place, a nice place, I feel perfectly safe even when I‚m taking a walk all by myself on the streets even in the middle of the night.“

husband:

„We have a maid who works in the house, she does the cooking and cleaning, we just don´t have the time. We both have our careers. We also have a gardener who takes care of our cactus garden. We make enough money for extra stuff, like cars, sports-events, dogs and summerhouses. In the summertime we vacation on a remote, just a beautiful remote island, where the peaceful atmosphere consumes all the stress and leaves us relaxed. I’m not weighed down by my responsibilities. We are all healthy, because of our healthy way of living. I don´t have an ounce of tension in my body. I work out three times a week, often going jogging along the beach with my dogs.“

wife:

„We both have carreers and we have a large home and lot‚s of cars. We spend the day working and in the evening we do fun things like watching TV or reading. I have lot’s of friends, who I speak to all the time, because I often call them on the cellphone. Sometimes I get so busy I don‘t get to see them as often as i like but it‘s nice to know how they are doing and what they are up to.“

husband:

„Every once in a while I like to be surrounded by beautiful and sexy women, put together well, because it’s nice to have a change. Oh, it’s nothing very serious. My wife, she is very sexy and she works hard at it, so I can´t complain. I enjoy having a mistress, a hot mistress every few months and then it’s over. It‘s important to have something to look forward to everyday, but I like to keep my routine consistent. I’m a very successful person and I know I’m contributing to the world. My life is fulfilling and when my time comes to go, I have no fear of death and no worry about any unsettled accounts.“

wife:

„I have nice cothes, I enjoy some luxuries, especially our two beautiful dogs. We have a nanny to take care of our son and our daughter. They go to private school, so we can make sure they get the best education possible. They are both beautiful and intelligent children, who I hope never grow up. I don´t worry about my husband leaving me for another woman. I don‘t look old, will never look old. I’m a self-independent, strong, focused woman.“

husband:

„This is a safe area, it´s a safe enviroment. There are no murders, no rape. People have nice homes and the streets are clean. There are no distinctions between the social classes and races.“

wife:

„I think our lives are perfect, nobody is suffering and there is no pollution. Everyone is fit and pleased with themselves, everyone is treated equally and there is plenty of freedom and love and perfect harmony for everyone.“