The land is civilized, free, prosperous, law-abiding, moderate and cautious. Its many virtues may be summarized as the “banality of the good.” Asked by the tabloid BILD-Zeitung what feelings Germany awakens inher, Angela Merkel once famously replied, “I think of well-sealed windows! No other country can make such well-sealed and nice windows.”
Timothy Garton-Ash, “The New German Question,” quoted by Adam Szymczyk in “14: Iterability and Otherness – Learning and Working from Athens’ in “The documenta 14 Reader”
No moral. No story. Except the grid, its subjects, this glass, their skin, these buildings, this video. To each subject some privacy, as lucid and available for viewing as the naked bodies, untouchable, mediated by video. If this privacy – neither abject nor regal – offers nothing, reveals nothing, still it is perfect, framed so. Imperfect, framed so. The filming is movingly, imperfectly provisional, strangely so. Imperfect bodies, imperfect architectures, imperfect images, imperfect weather, imperfect intimacy, imperfect cinema.
Quinn Latimer on ‘Daytime Version of the Night (2013) by Michel Auder, from the book ‘Stories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited and Produced by M. Auder.
