No matter how closely you watch them, nothing really happens in the short films of Corinna Schnitt. A distillation of her already very condensed practice can be seen in 18.8.2005 (2005) the artist sits immobile on the edge of a cliff in the Grand Canyon, a stalagmite in tourist’s clothes, on the film’s titular day. The tableau, recalling countless captured moments in perfunctory American vacations, is broken intermittently by the ominous presence of birds of prey circling over the calciform figure. Somewhere between a slide and a postcard, the image is also a signifier, recalling a vanitas allegory from an Old Master painting—a testament to the meretricious will of the human spirit. The film’s panorama is beautiful, and its protagonist’s need to leave her mark on it is maddeningly absurd –it is not the image here that is important, but the act of image-making- a fleeting Kodak moment without teleological egress.

Such hermeneutical absurdity is central to this long-time Cologne, now Berlin-based artist, who, since the early 1990s, has been making short films that depict the task of living as a desperate reckoning with tedium, a calculus of boring acts. A dozen or so in total, her works first seem like straightforward documentations of daily occurrences, stripped of emotional resonance, generating all the titillation of a public service announcement. For an artist who pointedly adheres to the traditional medium of film, her avoidance of the filmic is conspicuous: we never seem to arrive at a plot, much less a climax, or resolution. Nevertheless, in the Schnittian universe, precisely because it exists in film, time must somehow be filled. Leaving paranoid phone messages, daydreaming in parks, obsessively cleaning, and wandering aimlessly are some of the artist’s suggestions.

In Living a Beautiful Life (2003), a Los Angeles couple, as gilded as their environment (a hillside home, an exotic parrot), talk about themselves with canned self-satisfaction. Their well-aligned teeth shimmer like their pool as they list off accomplishments, hopes, and, rather gauchely, their further expectations. The husband speaks freely and with jarring candor:

Every once in a while, I like to be surrounded by beautiful and sexy women. Put together well. Because… because it’s nice to have a change. Oh, it’s nothing very serious. My wife, she’s very sexy… and she works very hard at it. So… I can’t complain. I enjoy having a mistress, a hot mistress every few months. And then it’s over. It’s important to have something important to look forward to every day. But, I like to keep my routine consistent. I’m very successful person and I know I’m contributing to the world.

Living exemplifies Schnitt’s emphatically passive style of direction. Rather than plumbing the quizzically shallow depths of her characters’ psychologies, the artist keeps her focus on the surface, allowing the subjects plenty of time to speak, room to breathe, (and possibly rope to hang themselves) while suppressing any hint of ethical judgment. Watching Living induces the same emotional dislocation that affects its protagonists. So, it comes as a small relief to learn that their near-pathological lack of self-consciousness is, in a sense, a special effect: all dialogue for the film was derived from the answers given by a group of middle school children to a questionnaire about their expectations of a purposeful life.

The structure of Living apes that of an excruciatingly flat-footed documentary; at other times Schnitt deploys a measure of visual charm, characterized by the strategic use of floating pans and exceedingly slow zoom-outs, as a visual analogue to the desultory monologues of the films’ actor-narrators. In Die Schlafende Mädchen (The Sleeping Girl) (2001), the camera languidly follows a small model yacht floating along a stream in a suburban park, and arrives at a porthole view of Jan Vermeer’s A Girl Asleep in an empty room, where an answering machine sounds the paranoid gusto of an insurance salesman’s voice:

Richards from Bamberg Insurance. Good afternoon, Ms. Schnitt. I came to see you some time last year, and I seem to remember we spoke about a disability insurance. I even sent you some information, if I remember rightly, and asked you on that occasion if you could return my ballpoint to me… It’s really very important to me. I can come and collect it myself, I’d just like it back. And it doesn’t really matter if you’ve decided against the insurance… My colleague has just given me a note to say that you called at 12:15 and that you do still have some questions about the pension scheme and the life insurance. I’m not sure what you would like to know, so we should get together, in which case you won’t have to send me my pen. I can pick it up myself.

This audio-visual pairing reappears in Raus aus seinen Kleidern (Out of Your Clothes) (2003), where a woman (played by the artist) repetitiously flap-dries a red dress on a high-rise balcony while a disembodied female voice (presumably hers) talks about laundry and her past relationships. The frame slowly widens to reveal a pristine but depopulated cityscape. The significance of the speaker’s words is astonishingly lost on her:

I do find it extremely important that you feel good in your clothes. That’s why I only wear them once unless it’s been a really nice day that I remember in which case I keep them on. But after two days, at the latest, I’ll put on something fresh.

The narrator goes on to provide a personal inventory: she has a computer, a scanner, and a printer; a big apartment with a terrace that she can barely afford; a father, who disapproves of her sleeping on a futon, comparing it to his days in World War II. She then matter-of-factly relates her wish to find a rich husband, so as to afford a nanny, so that she may have more time for herself. So it is no surprise her

…specialty, so to speak, is weekend relationships. It stays more exciting and you keep enough distance. You keep your head clear and you don’t get too attached.

At first glance, Schnitt appears to be suggesting that the analogy of a preference in sexual relationships to one for line-dried clothing (“That’s also a rule of mine that I don’t want to have a man who tumble dries his laundry”) over machine dried (“In a dryer, all kind of stuff gets mixed in and you feel it right away”) is revelatory of the person who can make such distinctions, but not of the society that makes such distinctions possible. The film suggest a rueful extrapolation of modernity, as fixed through Hobbes’ negative lens: probable safety, not happiness, is the primary goal of agency moving from individuality into the steps of civilization. And more engaged we are with civilization, more disengaged Schnitt’s characters become from their interior selves. But this distinction —between the autonomous subject beloved of bourgeois thought, and the social determinants that make her speech inevitably scripted before the fact—is parlayed only as suggestions. Our dissatisfaction with the limits of intimacy with the characters set by the artist, and our subsequent meting out of social judgments, are both anticipated and constitute the latent content of the films. This is a far cry from the ego-driven artistic ingenuity that, for better or worse, makes an art film an art film, and makes most of them unbearable. Instead, Schnitt’s films pan back from the subjectivism we’d expect, pulling us towards a dispassionate, but darkly humorous, survey of a systemic social problem.

Repeated viewing of these films reveals their shared subject: the inward parlor games of a society unable to reach a deeper, emotional accord with the world around it. For Schnitt’s people, who have no real reason to speak and arguably not much left to achieve, language becomes a self-recursive value. This is furhter evoked by the indeterminate genre of the films, positioned as they are in the studiedly awkward space between experimentation and narrative cinema. If the filmmaker seems ambivalent about what to do with the rudimentary stories she proposes (flesh them out into more substantial plots, unmask them as ideological constructs, or explode them altogether into pure formalism?) this reflects their protagonists’ similar impasse with respect to their own language games. Schnitt’s characters speak only in order to maintain continued pertinence as emotive and emotional figures. In the participatory roundabout of their daily routines, they simply endure.

This longing for agency’s relevance is at the core of one of Schnitt’s more ornate films, Schloss Solitude (2003). Filmed on location on the grounds of a Rococo palace in Stuttgart, it begins with a child dressed in 18th-century wardrobe observing a robust lady of the court (a class ancestor of Schnitt’s more contemporary characters) in the grand room of the castle. Her powdered face is visible only in her vanity mirror, which blocks her view of the village below. It is a tragedy of classically Grecian proportions: vanitas blinding over psyche. As she begins singing hollowly—I am someone special—the camera moves out to reveal a remarkably white and empty room, a desolate antechamber, and finally the castle’s exterior, where members of the real-life local policemen’s choir have assembled to intone the response to her refrain: Yes, yes, yes, we all love you.

But, love what, really? There is a threadbare, Learian emptiness in Von einer Welt (Of a World) (2007), where, in a grassy landscape, the nude and prostrate bodies of a dozen women lay. A clothed man walks through the field and approaches each one, attempting to spark a conversation, and at times making erotic overtures, to no avail. Foregrounded by passages from Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action (given in voice-over), the emancipatory possibilities of dialogue are reduced to the emblematic failure of social reality: roundabout chit-chat. Denuded, warped, and reified to wits’ end, Von einer Welt posits a society repeatedly hurtling toward its own bleak and self-manufactured stasis. One step, then another. It is painful to watch.