Ulrich Seidl (born 24 November 1952 in Vienna) is an Austrian film director, writer and producer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Seidl
Models (1997) examines the hopes, fantasies, and finally the
realities of young models. Although supermodels often figure as the
heroines or at least vaunted objects of desire in our society, Seidl
fixes on the rather banal everyday tics and predicaments from which the
women suffer: cellulite, breast problems, the inability to be alone and
the catty competition among them. With his unique blend of documentation
and stylisation,
Models portrays the models’ daily life and
the monotonous application of make-up and hair gel that commodifies the
body. It is a world of glamour whose shine and lustre Seidl rubs away.
Mattias Frey
http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/32/ulrich_seidl/
I saw this film at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival. Models is
a
thoroughly unpleasant tale, shot in a documentary style, about coked-up
and
unhappy models in Vienna. The excruciatingly long scenes alternated
between
existential longings for love and meaning, whining about physical
imperfections, real or imagined, and hedonistic pursuits. It made its
points
in the first ten minutes, then kept making them over and over and over for
the next hundred and ten. Maybe that was the point.
James McNally
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0199776/reviews?ref_=tt_urv
The statuesque women of Models (1999) only exacerbate the gap
between pretty façade and rotten interior, but what distinguishes it
from every other romp through the image industry (drugs, eating
disorders, pathological emptiness) is the director's eye for perfect
visual evocations of his subjects' feelings. Captured in the most
intimate situations, Models' models don't mind the ubiquitous
camera; thus rendered invisible, Seidl indulges in stylized compositions
that isolate physical and gestural oddities, including a startling
opening shot of a girl desperately repeating "I love you" to a mirror
that blocks out and replaces her face — an appropriate metaphor, since
throughout the rest of the film the camera voyeuristically hides behind
mirrors or else acts as one. If any véritist deserves credit for having
"written" his work, it's Seidl.
Michael Joshua Rowin
http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/aint-no-miserablism-like-austrian-miserablism/Content?oid=1205933
The inertia of the characters’ actions cannot be activated by fictional
devices that could give thematic richness to their behaviour. Seidl
arrives at cliché by filming cliché; it is as though the subject of
modelling fascinates him, but the subjects themselves are without much
interest, and the passive gaze that Seidl adopts in all his work is too
readily matched by the passive inexpressivity of his subjects. Another
filmmaker might have abandoned this project of bored, struggling models
and found others more narratively interesting: perhaps models going in
for a beauty contest, models that have recently been offered contracts
to do photo-shoots around the world. But such an approach would somehow
have violated Seidl’s claustrophobic aesthetic. How to hold to one’s
aesthetic of inertia – which runs through the director’s work – without
arriving at a certain inertness of thematic inquiry?
Tony McKibbin
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