Country Living

The documentary Country Living shows pictures and sounds of the daily life of a village community in Tirol. Spare, concentrated observations without commentary, evenly registered by a fixed camera. Views of the location are clearly structured, each scene separated from the next by a fade out. Eleven moments from provincial Austria. The material itself was shot in the years from 1970 to 1973, (by the then 25 year-old Christian Berger), capturing his home village Ampass and the surrounding area and was motivated by the daily disillusion he felt as a young TV cameraman. Twenty years later, during a cutting room clean-up he re-discovered the forgotten and essentially already structured material. The decision to have a copy for the cinema made was only the last step in a long process. What differentiates Country Living from similar works is the radical simplicity of its relationship to the documentary form - it is not a thematic illustration, rather the pictures and sounds stand for themselves; neither topicality nor sensationalism stand in the foreground but rather knowledge of and relationship to what is shown. Thus Country Living shows how branches are cut from the trees, how water washes over the street on a rainy day, how two little girls play out a fairy tale in the living room. And one hears the monotonous hammering of the ubiquitous housebuilders, the heavy bells after the "Sermon on the Mount" and the dancing rhythmn of a cement mixer. Country Living is a sound film in the literal sense: a virtuoso choreography of visual awareness, a film for all senses. (Constantin Wulff)