previously published on Cineuropa
The COVID-19 pandemic and the response, or responses, to it by the various governments affected everybody. The film world was not spared either: unable to continue with their scheduled projects, filmmakers switched to shooting the new, locked-down reality, or to adapting their new projects to it so they could continue their work while complying with the newly introduced safety protocols. A new term, “corona-film”, was coined, and that label was applied to different things, from home documentaries and shorts to movies taking place over Zoom or similar platforms, and also to fiction features with a limited team of cast and crew members, usually set in a restricted number of locations. Not all of the documentary and fiction works made under those conditions commented, or even tried to do so, on the pandemic reality in a meaningful way, and even fewer did so within a context wider than, let’s say, a household.
In that regard, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s newest documentary, The Standstill, is an exception, as it basically serves as a chronicle of the pandemic – or, more precisely, of the lockdowns and breaks from them in Austria and, more specifically, in the city of Vienna. It recently premiered in the international documentary competition of DOK Leipzig.
After the opening shot of a woman lying on a hospital bed with some kind of ventilator attached to her mouth and nose, and a textual info-card explaining the early history of COVID-19 globally and in Austria, the filmmaker establishes his style with a succession of shots of empty spaces, such as a road, a border crossing, an airport terminal, a shopping mall, a car park, a factory hall and, most impressively, a swimming pool dating from the late 19th or early 20th century. The shots are usually long and beautifully composed, with a strong sense of symmetry, and are separated from one another by blank, black screens.
The first words are only spoken some ten minutes in, by a medical specialist who explains the new situation, focusing on triage as a concept and the psychological pressure resulting from it. Geyrhalter then starts interviewing different people from different trades: a couple of small-business owners, a movie-theatre operator, a teacher giving lectures online to her class of teenagers, local politicians and so on. He keeps coming back to most of the people, as well as most of the locations, in different phases of the pandemic, while also introducing new events, from vaccination campaigns to anti-lockdown protests and anti-fascist counter-protests, occasionally breaking up the series of images with info-cards to provide a more precise context.
The Standstill serves as a genuine chronicle of events that is detailed and informative, without any direct conclusion or even a comment coming from the filmmaker’s proverbial mouth. This does not mean that Geyrhalter refrains from expressing his own attitude, but he chooses to do so in a more subtle way by letting the interviewees speak, selecting the material and relying on his editor, Gernot Grassl, to play with the pace in order to recreate the sensation of the passing of time that was felt back then, from the standstill, of sorts, to the hectic confusion of the ever-changing regulations. Filmed by Geyrhalter himself in his signature, aesthetically accomplished way, and enriched by the sound design by Nora Czalmer and Manuel Meichsner, The Standstill is, with a running time of 136 minutes, a tad overlong, but is still an easy watch of a documentary fuelled by the attention to detail invested in both the craft- and the content-related aspects.
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