Hunting Grounds
The first sequences of Hunting Grounds already reveal the strong creative will shaping this work. The images have an elaborate brilliancy, their framing carefully chosen - and their denseness produces in the viewer a mesmerizing effect that particularly befits the crime-story elements dramatized on the narrative level. It is difficult to escape getting caught up in the suspense. We strongly suspect that behind what we see here on the surface a gate opens up onto an obsessive abyss. A gate leading as it were to the opposite of what is visible here in the superficial world of the aristocracy with its soirées and hunting parties. This story told without words, accompanied only by a strongly accentuated soundtrack and music played by a string quartet, exposes an irrevocable, fundamental principle of social co-existence: the mechanisms - as the artist himself puts it of - drives and desires and their inherent dialectic of hunter and hunted. The fact that Schmidt makes use of an ostensibly outdated setting to visualize his theme only intensifies the power of his work, since the extreme form of emotional repression exemplified here - in the etiquette of the noble classes - collides with what can be viewed as its polar negation: animalistic lust and rebellion. (Wolfgang A. Döllerer)
About the video
About the artist
- 1968 in Herford, GER.
Studied at the Universität der Künste Berlin, GER, and at the Fachhochschule Hamburg, GER
