Everything
UK/AUSTRIA 2013 | 23:00 min | VHS/Hi8/MiniDV (extract)
Everything is a documentary adaptation of the fictional short story by the late Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Composed of misappropriated home-video tapes, the film lays bare the politics of domestic life as an unstable ground. Composed of home-video tapes, the film explores the ‘objective,’ near-scientific position from which a fictional male character observes and narrates the harrowing events that lead to the disintegration of his family life. The voice-over narration is adapted from the lead characters in Bachmann’s text. It articulates the inescapable confinement present in normative conceptions of domesticity, family relations and child development. As in Bachmann’s story, the film is narrated not from biographical, psychological, ‘heroic’ positions of the central characters, but through the surrounding material world: leaves in a tree, whiskey, a clock, lovers’ hands interlocking in a cinema queue, the wheels of a pram, a knife.