March 2008
The youngest child, the boy, has been stealing petty cash from the neighbors, while dad is wasting precious future generations alone in the shower. The daughter, on the cusp of teendom, is petulant and bombastic, given to outrageous manifestos and missing curfew. Mom copes by going shopping, and Dad disciplines with a Socratic lecture about private property and its liberating potential. Welcome to the sitcom-dysfunctional artist family, as filmed by Guy Ben-Ner, on location in Ikea. The family makes its home in the comfortably minimalist rooms of the furniture chain. Other shoppers stare, turn away, or summon security, in the course of the 17 minutes of Stealing Beauty (2007), his most recent video shown at Postmasters Gallery this winter.
Ben-Ner, 38, is known as something of a family guy. His previous videos either include his two children and wife dressed up as a troupe of ostriches (Elia, 2003) or Ben-Ner mooning over the family's absence (Treehouse Kit, 2005) where he installs - and reinstalls - a DIY treehouse kit and lives the desert island life.
Family life is constraint and inspiration, leading to other sidelong insights about things like the social compact and slapstick. There are usually about four shifting levels to a Ben-Ner video: 1) a funny setup (People dressed as ostriches! A family living in Ikea!); 2) dialogue full of one-liners coined by a reluctant socialist, skeptical of both a classless society and consumer culture; 3) formal play with film and video genre (here, a sitcom evolving - or devolving - into a Godard homage); 4) and, at bottom, a little lonely jig, a letter to oneself about solitude, even in the bosom of the family.
Stealing shoot time from Ikea had a lot to do with the meaning of the piece itself (form is still content). I wanted to ask him about that.
> CB: Why did you pick Ikea to film in?
< GBN: While working on Treehouse Kit for Venice almost three years ago, I went to buy furniture for it in Ikea. It was then that I first noticed the showrooms they have there. They looked like sitcom sets to me. Family sitcoms. Later I thought about sitcoms and the way they educate us, as proper families (much like nature documentaries do, which Elia deals with), while really repressing the whole economic aspect of the family cell.
Ikea, with the price tags dangling everywhere, as "the return of the repressed," seemed a perfect match to that (just as commercial breaks in TV sitcoms are part of the deal, and not a "break" in it). Besides, Ikea's marketing strategy is very much to make you feel at home (like McDonald's - you have the same familiar taste everywhere around the world, you feel at home everywhere), so we decided to feel at home.
> CB: What was the difference in sets in each Ikea and in the reaction of bystanders?
< GBN: We had around 50 shooting days in 5 or 6 different stores [including the Ikea in Elizabeth, New Jersey]. The sets are quite similar everywhere, though in Europe stores are more developed, have much more of a history to them. The store in Israel (there's only one) is a total mess, but basically it's a comfortable connection between the FAMILY and the FAMILIAR. It's easy to buy when you know the place.
The general arrangement of the stores are similar. The childrens' section is close to the cafeteria, which is itself at the starting /ending of the loop you make while you shop. The basic structure is known to you immediately. You do not get lost.
In Berlin, we were asked to stop shooting or to leave the store, quite often. The employees were much more alert. (Maybe they are getting paid better? Maybe it's a cultural thing?)
> CB: Did you 'borrow' anything from Ikea other than time?
< GBN: Funny, in relation to cinema, time is really money. You can borrow time and you can also steal a moment from someone. I stole the sets (I am always interested in ways to create cheap cinema), but also the music: the tune of the sitcom comes actually from an Ikea commercial running on monitors in the shop. I recorded it there, from the monitors and made it into a sitcom tune.
> CB: How much of the shooting script comes from quotes from Marx and Engels? Only where Elia is reading her "home work" to me. It is Engels' "The origin of the family, private property and the state." It is the only developed account I found of the relation between the structure of the family, as we know it, and private property (and the state). Put simply, the family, according to that book, is a social construction that came to life at the same time, and with relation to, the first real appearance of private property. The manifesto at the end is totally made up by me. It is my inheritance to my kids saying they should never accept any inheritance from me.
> CB: I love the idea that slapstick is tragedy without sound (a quote from the Father in Stealing Beauty). Is that a Ben-Ner original or is that intertextual as well?
< GBN: Ben-Ner original!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!