Maya Schweizer - Clemens Von Wedemeyer

Maya Schweizer 
Born in 1976 in Maisons-Alfort, France.
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Clemens von Wedemeyer 
Born in 1974 in Göttingen, Germany.

Lives and works in Berlin and Leipzig, Germany. 

Inspired by Samuel Beckett's play Catastrophe, the film Rien du tout/Nothing At All by Maya Schweizer and Clemens von Wedemeyer takes us to a film shoot to meet an authoritarian woman director, her bullied assistant, and a horde of extras on the verge of mutiny. By alternating shots made with a video camera with others made with a 35 mm camera, the film develops a critical language which precisely adapts its structure to its narrative. The use of video refers directly to the ideas of the “real” produced by the documentary and TV genre, whereas the film technique, for its part, puts the image in a fictional chord. This back-and-forth shift from one aesthetic strategy to another tallies with the actual ambivalence of the scripts which creates an endless duplication a –mise en abîme – in its own development, and shows us how it is made, alongside the story. In both the narrative and its visualization, what is involved here is the presentation of an upheaval in the established order, and the possible disappearance of any kind of hierarchy.