Dabernig

Josef Dabernig

Josef Dabernig’s film treatises on absence and presence established his reputation on the international art scene as an art film director and fine artist. In Rosa Coeli, different motifs are linked in a composite plot: one strand shows scenes from a train journey to a hotel in an industrial village in the mountains. The place can easily be localized as one with a Socialist past. With no audience and no media, the backdrop of this dilapidated Eastern bloc Modernist hotel, where the main protagonist meets two other men—both physically handicapped like himself—to sit silently and sign a document at a table decorated for the ceremony, is the second main character in Rosa Coeli. In a rhythmic sequence of scenes, the act of signing the document and the design history of the hotel unfold. With determined relaxedness and unerringly mechanical routine, Dabernig’s amateur actors play out this double plot that boils down to nothing but their almost eerie presence.