Closed Quarters

"When grandmother died, the house was simply different ... as though we had changed the curtains." The camera explores the geographical and mental space, which after the grandmother´s death is infected with an omnipresent lack. The house, a farmhouse somewhere in the foothills of the Austrian Alps, is the actual protagonist. The house and its rooms have observed a lot. They form a huge memory where the past coexists with the present, where memories - of illness, death, childhood - are symptomatically updated. Closed Quarters avoids a subjective-biographical perspective, fictionalizing the encounter with death right from the outset in a type of reduced "haunted house horror film": oppressive Super-8 remnants of memories from a small girl´s perspective - strange sounds penetrate from the drains; there is something eerie in the cellar.
Somewhat later, it is as though we awaken from the nightmare into a documentary when the filmmaker-now on video-again visits the house. Terse off-screen conversations with relatives, their identities remaining acoustically and visually in the dark, tell of departure, loss, emptiness, and the work that has now increased for the others. The camera symptomatically finds what is missing in apparently idyllic corners in and around the farm; shows usual work processes from precarious perspectives, sketches late summer atmospheres, intimates at melancholy. Theresia Grösslinger washes away and falsifies traces of a personal family history to reveal a poetic texture that aims at the generality of death, without falling into chatty nihilism-kitsch or bizarre morbidity-which in Austria is no small feat.

(Michael Palm)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt