Director: Antonia Ackermans
Running time: 4mins
Heroldian Townhouse is a micro-documentary from return filmmaker Antonia Ackermans – following up her first Indy Film Library submission, the micro-fable Float. And while the two films might seem at disparate ends of the artistic spectrum, the minute run-time is not the only thing which the two projects have in common.
Ackermans has carried over an eye for whimsical imagery – shot in RED digital, 16:9 – between projects. And once again, she has entrusted the responsibility to director of photography Mario Karner, to make the most of every inch of that particular frame. Once again, Karner excels in this role – and that’s important, because there is a lot to take in here.
Heroldian Townhouse is a study of a very particular house in Spain, the new owner of which has aspired to turn it into a partially public art gallery. What follows is a wonderfully tactile celebration of physical media; rays of white light highlighting every groove and edge of the Alladin’s cave of paintings, sculptures, pottery and antiques – it all feels so tangible, so immediate, and in a digital age (indeed, in a digital format), that feels like a kind of wonderful holiday, where we don’t have to marvel at what a computer is or isn’t doing, and can instead get lost in the great sweep of human creation’s recent history.
The sound design and editing Helena Moser also underline this so keenly – every movement, every change of scene seems to be accompanied by some diegetic sound that grounds us in the moment, from the click of a window-frame to the shuffling of chair-legs sliding under a table, these noises guide us as much as the piano-driven score.
This kind of wordless world-building and story-telling is where Ackermans excels as a director. And her team’s work here also makes it so much easier to go along with a not-insubstantial amount of talking-head footage (which, when the film hinges upon it, often the death of a documentary’s atmosphere). Katharina, the art curator who has turned her house into a venue for people to come and marvel at (and ideally buy) her huge collection of artefacts, does not overstay her welcome at all as a subject – and that is particularly important, given the irony that she has invited us into her home in the first place.
There are some things which I do still have a small issue with, though, beyond the film’s technical execution. Most immediately, this comes from the quote which prefaces everything else. A title card citing Le Corbusier reads: “The home should be the treasure chest of living.”
My gut reaction to that idea, placed only in relation to the titular Heroldian Townhouse by the film, is “That’s easy for you to say.” I dare venture that a presumably wealthy art curator, who has enough capital at her disposal to turn an unoccupied house in Spain into an art gallery on a whim probably doesn’t have much trouble making her home into a treasure chest.
And yes, certainly you don’t need to be rich to have treasures in a figurative sense. My tiny apartment is filled to bursting with things which I value immensely, thanks to their sentimental value, or because (while the rest of the art world might disagree), I think they are aesthetically wonderful. But we don’t get that contrast in this film. We don’t get to see what a treasure chest is like in the homes of the other 99% – and while I am sure that is completely unintentional, that comes across as just a smidge elitist. (Especially as the line between ‘collector’ and ‘hoarder’ often gets drawn along class status.)
It is nice to be invited into this world for a brief moment, and to marvel at the magnificent bower that Katharina has feathered here. But in absence of seeing the other ways in which people less financially successful, but no less important, do the same thing in their own spaces, it feels a bit like a vignette you would find in a lifestyle magazine show, rather than a film exploring that Le Corbusier statement.
I have noted that this film might seem chiefly concerned with being pretty, oh so pretty – but it does avoid being labelled vacant; because it does still offer up a rich experience, that begs the viewer to go and do something important: go out into the world, and engage with real, physical art wherever possible. Ackermans and her team are doing good work to that end – even if I do hope to see something a bit more expansive from their future documentary efforts.
