THE HAPPINESS OF STILL LIFE

THE HAPPINESS OF STILL LIFE

    Price: $210.00

    Code: 1111

    Directed by Andrea Simon
    1989, 27 minutes

    After the Napoleonic wars and the revolutionary fervor of the late 18th century, Europeans were eager to retreat from the tumultuous arena of history to the uneventful calm of private life. In Vienna, the capital of the reactionary Restoration, this attitude was expressed in Biedermeier culture, the first fully realized expression of bourgeois sensibility in 19th century Europe, which attempted to shape the new age in the image of an emergent middle-class ethos of home and family. This film-essay, in the style of Joseph Cornell's collage boxes, portrays the Beidermeier sensibility through its meditation on a series of beautiful objects-sewing boxes, friendship books, painted teacups, lockets, eyeglasses, chairs-amidst a narrative adapted from the memoirs of Eduard von Bauernfeld, a prolific Viennese litterateur and accompanied by the music of Schubert.

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