Apnoe
Normality is a matter of opinion. For the protagonists in the ten-minute film by Hund & Horn, the fact that their world has a fundamentally different “consistency,” at first, does not seem to interrupt their everyday routine. Superficially, everything runs normally in the (underwater) world of the Berger family, even when the head of the woman, one of the conservative parents, is nearly obfuscated by the toothpaste-spit-spray during her morning routine, or when the father has to perform a little acrobatic trick before enjoying his breakfast toast in order to grab hold of the floating slice. There is the usual parent-child constellation: the reprimand, “Anna, sit up!” flute lessons following the middle-class educational canon; the boob tube as the parents’ somniferous evening entertainment, while the daughter sneaks out of the house to have a drink and dance a bit at her favorite bar.
La grande fadesse—if not for the scrupulously laid out stumbling blocks, which make these, and also our own everyday lives appear fragile. The largely wordless communication is thereby a symptom of a society calibrated on ritual gestures and coded mimic expressions rather than a result of the living environment. The fundamental difference between a self-evident non-verbal understanding (when dancing and flirting, no words are necessary), and a lack of understanding resting on muteness (since there are no words for the important matters) becomes increasingly obvious. And also the daughter’s seemingly environmentally-conditioned motor activity can be interpreted on closer inspection as a counter-act to specific constraints and patterns. With this film, Hund & Horn draft a microdrama of sorts that by means of absurdity and slapstick, and first and foremost, without warning, scratches off the scab of a supposed holy world.
(Irene Müller)
On the surface, Apnoe describes a day in the life of a family. Yet the protagonists have considerable difficulty in coping with their everyday life. Confronted with no gravity, the family ensemble becomes unstable and the hierarchical structure begins to dissolve.
Apnoe is the third part of a “gravity trilogy“. In their films, Hund & Horn ereduce spatial conditions and the notion of normality joyfully and wryly to absurdity.
Apnoe
2011
Austria
10 min