BISFF Correspondence 通信计划
This program involves conducting brief email interviews with the directors of the international films featured in the festival, in lieu of the traditional Q&A session that follows the screenings. Through this program, we hope to provide a platform for filmmakers to discuss their work and share their insights with our audience in China.
为了跨越种种障碍，开辟更多交流空间，我们设置了“BISFF Correspondence 通信计划”，对部分国际单元的参展作者进行系列访谈，这些访谈将在作品放映后发布在联展各个媒体平台。
No Wonder｜Kein Wunder｜不言而喻
Lia Sudermann, Simon Nagy
2024｜0:11:26｜Austria｜German｜World Premiere
Director: Lia Sudermann, Simon Nagy
Interviewer & Translator: Anqi Liu
Coordinator & Editor: Suliko
导演：莉娅·祖德曼，西蒙·纳吉
采访、翻译：刘安琦
统筹、编辑：苏丽珂
Q1: There's a wealth of photographic material from the last century in this work. Could you please tell us how you mainly acquired these resources? And during this process, are you interested in the specific background information when each photo was taken?
我们在短片中看到了大量上世纪中的摄影资料，请问创作者主要以什么渠道收集这些素材？在这个过程中，会对每张照片被拍摄时具体的背景信息感兴趣吗？
The photographs you can see in the film all stem from one specific archive: a collection of pictures taken by the photographers and journalists Egon and Erika Blaschka in the years 1950–1966 for the regional newspaper "Kleine Zeitung." In 2024, the Museum for History in Graz, Austria, curated an exhibition specifically on this photographic archive. The curators engaged with the pictures in order to talk about labour, especially feminised labour: the photographs are used to explore the gendered distribution of labour in the Austrian post-war society, the reproduction and production of gendered gazes and gendered roles through photography – and, importantly, how these historical phenomena continue into the present moment. The curators did a fantastic job at researching the modes of production of the individual images, providing information about their context, background information, and on the decisions which photos were printed in the newspaper – and which weren’t.
In this context, we were invited to deal with 10.000 of these digitised photographs artistically: to produce a film that would be shown as a part of the exhibition. By arranging the images in experimental sequences and talking about them in our dialogic voice-over, we tried to find various personal and political relationships to the images. We allowed ourselves to work quite associatively and, in doing so, introduce contemporary feminist perspectives into both the exhibition and the archive itself.
这部电影中呈现的照片全部来自一个特定档案：摄影师兼记者埃贡（Egon）和埃里卡·布拉施卡（Erika Blaschka）在1950年至1966年间，为奥地利地方报纸《小报》（Kleine Zeitung）拍摄的照片。2024年，奥地利格拉茨历史博物馆举办了一场专门针对这一摄影档案的展览。策展人对这些照片进行了深入研究，以探讨劳动问题，尤其是被女性化了的劳动。展览使用这些照片来展示奥地利战后社会劳动的性别化分配，以及那些借由摄影作品被反复生产和再生产的性别凝视、性别角色——更重要的是，去说明这些历史现象如何延续至今。针对其中个别照片的生产模式，策展人也展开了出色的研究，提供了有关其语境及背景的信息，包括哪些照片被刊登在报纸上，而哪些没有被刊登。
在此背景下，展览邀请我们使用这10,000张数字化照片进行艺术创作：制作一部将在展览中放映的电影。通过将图像按照实验顺序排列，并以我们的对话式旁白对其进行讨论，我们试图找出与这些图像相关的各类私人性或政治性的关系。我们试图以一种富有关联性的工作方式，将当代女性主义视角引入展览和档案当中。
No Wonder, Lia Sudermann, Simon Nagy, 2024
Q2: In this short film, you choose a set of photos that are focused on a specific era, for example, the nuclear family and labor images of the contemporary era are not presented in the film, but the issue you actually want to discuss is not a problem limited to "historical stories," right?
在短片中，导演选择的照片集中在一个特定的年代，比如，当代的核心家庭与劳作图像并没有在影片中呈现出来，但短片想要讨论的其实并不是一个被局限在“历史故事”中的问题对吗？
A2: Exactly. In our collaborative practice of the past years, we’ve been dealing with questions of reproductive work, how a care strike could look like, and when and why the nuclear family became our dominant, practically unchallenged form of living. We were curious to find out what would happen if we link these thoughts with the archival photographs. On the one hand, we can look at the historical material and see what past modes of living can become legible in them. On the other hand, we can also use them to critically engage with our current situation by asking: What has changed? What still looks the same as it did back then? And what may look different, but is still essentially the same? This way, we aim to not only read the images, but also our perceptions of the present against the grain.
After all, the photographs portray a specific era in Austrian society in which the nuclear family and the identity of the housewife became hegemonic. This mode of living, which can also be called the privatisation of care, is still widely uncontested. We were interested in trying to trace back these social phenomena that seem "natural" to many of us now, although they were produced not that long ago through shared interests of capital and patriarchy. We aim to undertake an inquiry into our present through an associative analysis of images that might seem old-fashioned, outdated or even ancient, but can tell us a lot about how we came to live as we are now living.
确实。在过去几年的合作中，我们一直在探讨有关生育劳动的问题，包括护理罢工会有怎样的形态，以及为何核心家庭会成为几乎未受挑战的主导性生活方式。我们也很好奇，如果将这些想法与档案照片联系起来，会发生什么。一方面，我们可以查看历史资料，看看过去的生活方式如何在照片中变得清晰可见。另一方面，我们也可以利用它们来批判性地审视当前状况，比如问自己：“有什么改变吗？哪些看起来和以前一样？哪些看起来不同但在本质上还是一样的？”如此一来，我们就不仅可以解读这些图像，还可以逆向地审视我们对当前生活的感知。
毕竟，这些照片描绘了奥地利社会中一个特定的时代，在此时期，核心家庭以及家庭主妇的身份成为了支配性的叙述。而这种可以被称为照护私有化（the privatisation of care）的生活方式，至今尚未受到过基本质疑。我们特别想要去追溯那些在不久前才由于资本与父权制的共同利益而形成，却被当下大多数人视为“自然而然”的社会现象。我们的目标是通过关联性分析来探究我们的现状，因为那些看似过时、陈旧甚至古老的图像，可以告诉我们很多关于今日生活由何而来的信息。
No Wonder, Lia Sudermann, Simon Nagy, 2024
Q3: You mentioned how photographs have powerfully shaped people's imaginations about labor division and family structures. Beyond your own personal experiences with the topic, did this work also inspired by other films or even sociological studies? Please share some key references that were important to you.
您有提到照片如何强势地塑造了人们对劳作分工、家庭结构的想象，除了在自己的生活中对这个话题有所体验，这次的作品是否也受到其它影片甚至社会学研究的启发？请和我们分享一些对您来说很重要的参考对象吧。
A3: For our first collaborative film, Invisible Hands(2021), which also revolved around questions of visibility, care work, and how to strike against it, we read a lot of texts together. Some of the most influential ones were the militant studies undertaken by the Spanish collective Precarias a la deriva, and Isabell Lorey’s thoughts on precarity in State of Insecurity, but also labour struggles by 24-hour migrant care workers that took place in Austria a lot around the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
While producing No Wonder, we continued these lectures and discussions, and focused more closely on the genealogy of the nuclear family and early feminist critiques of it. Influential texts for us were Silvia Federici’s essay "Wages Against Housework" from 1975, the recent book After Work by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, and Sophie Lewis’s manifesto "Abolish the Family." However, it is one of our aesthetic aims to not simply quote from theoretical texts in our films, but to digest them and present their arguments through our live dialogue, and through our organic – if sometimes stumbling – way of speaking.
我们合作的第一部电影《看不见的手》（Invisible Hands，2021）也围绕着可见性、照护工作以及如何对抗这些问题进行了深入探讨，当时我们一起阅读了很多文本。其中一些最具影响力的文本是西班牙团体“非稳定飘航”（Precarias a la deriva）所做的激进研究，以及伊莎贝尔·洛雷（Isabell Lorey）在《不安全状态》（State of Insecurity）一书中对脆弱性的思考，此外还有在奥地利发生的24小时移民护理工人的劳动斗争，这些斗争在COVID-19大流行初期非常频繁。
制作《不言而喻》时，我们在继续跟进这些讲座和讨论，同时也更密切地聚焦在核心家庭起源以及早期女性主义对此的批评上。对我们来说，有影响力的文本包括西尔维娅·费德里奇（Silvia Federici）1975年发表的《以工资反对家务劳动》（Wages Against Housework）一文，海伦·海斯特（Helen Hester）和尼克·斯尔尼茨克（Nick Srnicek）最近出版的《工作之后》（After Work）一书，以及索菲·刘易斯（Sophie Lewis）的宣言《废除家庭》（Abolish the Family）。然而，我们的美学目标是不仅要在电影中引用这些理论文本，还要消化它们，并通过我们的现场对话以及有机的表达方式（尽管有时可能有些笨拙）来呈现这些论点。
more information: https://www.bisff.co/selection/no-wonder