HÉRITAGE

Mertens & Marti highly condensed, as mentors as well as creators, and thus: as friends of ruthless satire and practitioners of a worldly-wise and concise poetry of sounds, light and colours. In Do It Yourself, the debut filmmakers Erich Langjahr and Walter Marti demonstrate how to fight the excesses of television and consumption: by scrapping, burning or chopping up television sets. What is discarded in the process (including European ideals) – from morning debate programmes to glossy TV drama – hovers through space in a ghostlike way. A scornful new world… And then, Héritage: a film about how an individual embodies the persistence of ideals – in an intimate way, internally. This individual is the composer and painter Peter Mieg, observed in his own four walls and garden: a still life with music and an attempt to tell the story of a person from within his surroundings. Mieg’s ideas are conveyed by Mertens & Marti through his music, which is played on the soundtrack, as well as through the world that he has built around himself over decades, quasi as a projection of his inner life. A world that Mertens & Marti break down into forms and structures, which ironically thwart the pathos of bourgeois culture and the preservation of traditions with a deft hand and affectionate observation.