DANUBE HOSPITAL

The film opens with a slow futurist ballet. Automatic carts slide across a
pristine floor, quietly following their programmed route and recalling their
presence with a synthetic voice. Are we in a high tech factory? No, we are in
a hospital in Vienna, one of the biggest in Europe: the Donauspital.
In keeping with his approach, consisting of rigorously framed long shots
(recalling the icy observation in Our Daily Bread, devoted to the food industry),
Nikolaus Geyrhalter and his reduced team (due to constraints of space)
placed the camera in this location where so many existences file past, from
birth to death. The surgical gaze of the filmmaker is exhaustive (from one
floor to another, from a massage in the emergency room, to religious services
to work meetings) and is simply organized in relation to the chronology
of a life. Assembling, sorting, measuring and cutting the meat in the cantine
and the bodies on the dissection table, repairing the robots with blows from
a hammer like the bones of a patient: everything is equalized by the camera.
Observation is the key word. Because what is revealed here is the cruel
affinity between the medical act and that of the filmmaker. The same precision,
the same efficiency: the same distance. Thus an eye operation, carried
out with the aid of a video recording shot in close-up, underlines the project
of the film which is not to unveil a separate rational universe but to present
Donauspital as a model of our world, a magnifying mirror of our modernity
where the contours are suddenly sharper. (NF)