COOK, EAT & CLEAN – Ritual of Disobedience 

SAT 20 NOV

Herbst

Director: Meinhard Rauchensteiner

Format: Short Film

Duration: 3 min

Short description

Human beings are able to learn. Animals also. Plush toys, too?

A non-visible teacher tries to teach Rainer Maria Rilke´s poem Autumn to a plush toy. In the process, the stuffed animal develops an exclusively linguistically mediated personality of its own. It follows the text, fails, refuses, revolts. The teacher, in turn, yells, flatters, screams. An absurd pedagogy en miniature. What is actually happening is the unfolding of a learning game between absent person and present machine: the human, as a voice that is considered genuine, provides the verses divided into word groups and a tinny, artificial-sounding voice tries to mimic them. The „talking monster,“ as the toy is called in the credits, swallows individual words like a dumb high-school student. The school master’s voice caresses it gently at times, and other times rules over it, annoyed, torturing it with the repetition of individual words. With that, the film topples into the absurd. „The absurd person,“ says Dirk Baecker, „is one step further than the ironic, just as the ironic person is one step further than the serious one.

BIO

Born in Vienna in 1970. Studied philosophy, fine arts, applied arts, theology and political science at the University of Vienna, the Academy for Fine Arts and the University for Applied Arts. 1999-2007 Deputy spokesman of the Austrian Federal President, speechwriter; from 2007: Advisor for Science, Culture and Art to the Austrian Federal President.

Books: Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Couch (Wien 2009), Wie man einen Picasso zersägt (Wien 2010), Das kleine ABC des Staatsbesuches (Wien 2011); films: und du hast nie etwas gesehen (2013, with Nives Widauer); Herbst (2015)

Credits  Idea/Concept: Meinhard RauchensteinerI Cinematography: Daniel Zimmermann

Editing: Daniel Zimmermann I Voice : Meinhard Rauchensteiner