DV PAL 5:40 min, © Hund & Horn 2002
Nothing particularly special appears to happen in Tomatoheads. A regular couple doing regular things. But something becomes increasingly strange in the way they are behaving, something that the spectator cannot read clearly. The world seems to be turning upside down.
DV PAL 12 min, © Hund & Horn 2003
Habibi Kebab is a film about the life of an artist. The film does not present a misty-eyed romantic image of an artist’s day to day life. It looks with relentless candidness behind the facade of the art business.
We gain an insight into the various complex problems that lurk along the path to fame and success: generation conflicts, exploitation by conceited or unprofessional gallery owners, but also the self-doubt, jealousy and misinformation dominating the discourse – which only looks rational on the surface.
5:30 min, HD and 35 mm, © Hund & Horn
Dropping Furniture displays the destruction of a habitat. The film is meant to symbolize the loss of existence (Production note).
What remains when nothing is left and life is literally turned upside down? Dropping Furniture initially focuses on two empty rooms. Quiet, barely perceptible sounds create subtle suspense. After a few seconds, when we have almost become accustomed to the seemingly existential emptiness of the seemingly deserted dwelling, two pieces of furniture fall into the room at the back from above the edge of the picture in slow motion. Then a chandelier in the large room at the front floats to the floor, shatters and gives the starting signal for a choreography of destruction structured by two fixed shots. As if by magic, a sofa, a reading lamp or an armchair with stuffed animals float to the ground.
The furniture of an obviously old-fashioned, stuffy living room is disposed of, only to shatter on the floor, orchestrated by a soundtrack synchronized with the slowed-down image and equipped with a lot of reverb. When the weighty wall shoring finally shatters, a telephone begins to ring in real time – a final indication of communication. Even the houseplants and the aquarium that fall down towards the end provide no clues as to the originator and motivation of this termination ritual, which harbors a subtle punchline. It is true that, similar to the cliché of the rock star throwing the television out of the window, we are ridding ourselves of a suffocating world of things in an act of destructive liberation. On the other hand, it is precisely the debris that weighs down the empty space anew, filling it with the spreading garbage of its own history. At the end, after the fade to black, we think we hear more objects hitting the ground. They sound like the thunder of a cleansing thunderstorm (Thomas Edlinger)
HD 11 min, © Hund & Horn 2010
For Mouse Palace, a 1:10 scale model of an existing apartment was built from food, and made available to mice as living space. The rodents made themselves at home in their new habitat and soon began to eat it up. The process of decay was accompanied by fierce territorial battles between two males. Mouse Palace is the continuation of Hund & Horn’s Living Space Series, which includes Tomatoheads, Dropping Furniture and Apnea.
The content of the series is the depiction of human existence under absurd conditions. In the case of Mouse Palace, mice take the place of humans.
