Our Daily Bread, 2006

Evoking the aesthetics of Harun Farocki’s antiseptic images of production crossed with Chantal Akerman’s structuralist ruminations on organic landscape, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread is a bracing, surreal, sobering, and strangely transfixing exposition into the dehumanized technologies and industrially engendered process efficiencies intrinsic in the mass commerce of industrial-scale food production. Composed of a series […]

Elsewhere, 2001

In 2000, the final year of the twentieth century, Nikolaus Geyrhalter and his crew set out with a digital video camera to film twelve, self-contained ethnographic episodes, each encapsulating a month-long document of the lives of people who perform their quotidian rituals in a figurative “elsewhere” – distant cultures and remote geographies seemingly left untouched […]

Washed Ashore, 1994

An elderly cemetery caretaker, Josef Fuchs, impassively looks out into the Danube River before turning to face the camera and reciting Count Albrecht Graf Wickenburg’s requiem for the namenlos – the unidentified dead, often people who committed suicide or lost their lives in boating accidents, whose bodies have washed up along the riverbank over the […]