Hochzeit im Paradeis

One of the defining features of Friedl vom Gröller’s cinematic miniatures is that they seldom linger long enough to generate a complete context for themselves, meaning they are often surprising and sometimes rather strange. HOCHZEIT IM PARADEIS begins with a brief shot of women meeting at an airport and is immediately followed by a trip “back in time” through costuming and comportment. We observe a formal al fresco wedding between a grown man and a child bride. Played too straight to be comedy, the film shows a devious, even surreal side of the filmmaker not often seen. In L’AVENIR? DE F.V.G? we observe at a public laundry the intersection of two systems of visual signification. First, a woman (Corrine Gache) addresses the camera in sign language. Her sentences are repeated, the second time with a translation. We discover that she is waiting in the laundromat for her friend from Senegal (Aisha N’Dour), who will tell her fortune using cowrie shells. As Aisha reads the piles of shells on the folding table, we see that vom Gröller is herself using the language of silent cinema to organize a micro-drama of communication and hope within the drab spaces of the everyday. (Michael Sicinski)

In the presence of Friedl vom Gröller.