Teilweise von mir – Ein Volksstück

The film, made on super8, was a colaborative effort between Hellmuth Costard, Winfried Burtschel, Susanne Müller, and Thomas Wittenburg. It connects diverse statements and opinions about jobs, the economy, money, advertising, human beings and technology. The filmmakers have 600 passersby, in Hamburg and Munich among other places, recite sentences such as “Who decides when you have to feel ashamed?”, “Do plants have a soul?” or “No weaving loom, no fabric”. The result is a collective monologue, full of deeper meaning and amusing at the same time, on the state of consumer and labour culture in the West. “Making the film was extremely labour-divided. The production of a razor blade or a vacuum cleaner is also extremely labour-divided. For the consumer this fact is largely irrelevant. With the film we succeeded in making the function of the division of labour in production a central feature of the final appearance of the product itself. On the level of material production such a procedure is mere utopia. With the medium of film however at least aspects of this utopia can be experienced sensibly.” (Hellmuth Costard)