INTO THE WORLD

SHORTThis moving portrait of a maternity clinic in Vienna grants an intriguing insight into the drama, the pain and beauty of coming into the world. In its entire complexity and variety the everyday miracle of giving birth as well as the cycle of its accompanying routine procedures within the clinic are demonstrated with the stylistic means of Direct Cinema. Into the World is a chronicle of the beginning of life and the organisational apparatus that we are born into.

SYNOPSIS

A maternity clinic in Vienna is the setting of Constantin Wulff’s moving documentary Into the World. In the finest tradition of direct cinema the film dispenses entirely with commentary, interviews and music, and any kind of exposition at all: The viewer is merely placed in the middle of the action. Thanks to the art of careful editing, fascinating observations and microdramas of everyday life are assembled into larger themes that go far beyond a simple portrait of a medical clinic, becoming in a sense a portrait of society as it relates to birth. Characteristic of the film’s complexity is the first depiction of a birth: Over ten minutes in length, it’s the longest scene of all, one of the most intense and - depending on the point of view of those involved - either everyday routine or high drama. Together with others, which are recorded with equal confidence, the result is a small panorama of the many aspects of how individuals enter the world between pain and happiness, and this is embedded in a larger, fascinating panorama of its institutional nature. As if to emphasize the singular aspect and adventure of each birth, the film begins with a critical situation: a baby in an incubator, the diagnosis is uncertain. The title is followed by a depiction of the cycles in the clinic’s daily routine: from examination to examination, from ultrasound to ultrasound. Inserted between the individual microdramas are incidental observations with deeper meanings and, most importantly, procedures that repeat until they become a leitmotif. The film shows the necessary, “concealed” processes such as the arrangement of medications and instruments; the analysis of information; the weighing and measuring, washing and feeding of the newborns, and of course the inconspicuous omnipresence of the cleaning staff. Most importantly, the growing mountain of files represents the unavoidable proliferation of organizational work. Into the World is a chronicle of life’s beginning - and the organization surrounding it.

On Constantin Wulff’s Into the WorldNothings demonstrates the fragility of human life more clearly than the sight of a newborn child. And so the film Into the World begins, though slowly and quietly, with an alarming image: that of a gasping infant in an incubator. A baby behind Plexiglas, doubly cut off in the intensive-care unit of a gynecological clinic in Vienna: This is the film’s subject, the innermost chamber in the world. This study of an institution shows daily routine, and also matters of fundamental importance, in an expedition through nurses’ lounges and maternity wards, through reception areas, waiting areas and examination rooms.Knowing full well that he’s not the first person to make a film at this kind of location, director Constantin Wulff dispenses with the conventions of television reports: He doesn’t provide well-rounded portraits of women about to become mothers, or “what’s she doing now” stories, or classic human interest stories, which automatically come to mind in connection with the subject. Into the World takes a different approach, presenting brief, intense episodes about the clinic’s administration and the experiences of various anonymous pregnant women on their way through the mills of the medical bureaucracy they’ve entrusted themselves to. This work can’t be termed exaggeratedly solicitous: Wulff also thematizes, in a matter-of-fact way, the extreme pain experienced during birth, that atavistically physical act of which three examples are shown here, in a finely calibrated mixture of discretion and explicit voyeurism.Into the World is direct cinema in a literal sense: a direct film that carries the viewer along, and without a manipulative soundtrack or the filmmaker’s intervention. Accompanied by Johannes Hammel’s quick-reacting camera, Wulff records a many-faceted and unsentimental portrait of the possibilities and complications of giving birth in a facility intended for this purpose: the miracle of human life as a product of institutional routine.
Stefan Grissemann