Days without a smile - «the doorman» by Domiziana Giordano & Reiner Strasser

The doorkeeper is the one who knows everything , and yet he is the one to miss out everything. He always knows exactly who has shared a secret night of love with whom, but he himself has never lived through it. He has even seen just who staggers in homewards, blabbering, late at night, but he himself remains sober, and keeps silent. The door-keeper also knows who has lost his job and the embarassing reasons behind – but he himself continues to sit on his chair. The power of the doorkeeper lies in his powerlessness: he can take part in everything, but is still excluded from the experience.

Day after day, night after night, the doorkeeper sits in his cabin. He leafs through the newspaper, stares into the small television on his otherwise empty table. It is only through the media that the world reaches out to him. Even the lobby behind the glass window of his cabin is just such a medium: between their life outside and their life inside the inhabitants of the building make their appearance here for a brief moment only. They hardly take note of the doorkeeper: he has long since become part of the inventory. Only on rare days do they favour him with a smile, when they are left with one to spare.

Domiziana Giordano and Reiner Strasser talk about days without smiles in their Net project «the doorman [passing]». For two months Giordano observed and photographed the doorkeeper of a rented apartment – nothing happened for two months. Underscored by melancholy music from a flute, consisting of no more than three notes which repeat constantly, Strasser mounted the pictures into a series of six «portals», from where onwards we can usher in other series of pictures. While the six «Portal Pictures» show the doorkeeper in his corner in the cabin, many of the remaining photgraphs depict the world of the lobby from the doorkeeper’s perspective.

«For me, the camera is the eye of a person, through whose imagination we see the events on the canvas », says the director of yore, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, who perhaps made the most famous film on a doorkeeper with his «The last man» in 1924. In a similar fashion, in the work of Giordano and Strasser, too, the doorkeeper’s perspective turns more and more into our own view: in the sluggish roller-coaster ride of these images we spiral in successively into the role of the doorkeeper, we take on his role in this stifling studio-piece with only one set and no end.

The cinematographic narrative style of this project is hardly surprising, Domiziana Giordano was an actress, having played lead roles in films like «Nouvelle Vague» by Jean-Luc Godard or «Nostalghia» by Andrei Tarkovsky, while Reiner Strasser is engaged in net poetry. The specific narrative style of «the doorman» however takes us rather to the beginnings of film history , back to Murnau, for instance. It is also known of Murnau that he kept going back to photography between 1923 and 1931. Photographic shoots were for him a first step towards the moving picture, the visual work process of the cineast thus began long before the actual filming.

However, whereas Murnau, seconded by his cameraman Karl Freund, hurries his doorkeeper mercilessly to his fate in his famous «camera unleashed », Giordano and Strasser have adapted their manner of narration to the conditions of the Net. Because it is not the camera that is unleashed here, but our own imaginative powers: it is the doorkeepers in our heads who combine these images into a claustrophobic «Huis clos». Beause we all of us let life pass us by, occasionally, and look on – and it is this doorkeeper in us who brings us to schudder at this.

Samuel Herzog