True Stories (Strangers)
/9
- True Stories (Strangers)
- 2003
- video, color, sound
- 3min, 5sec
Carola Dertnig, having just gotten off a train at Vienna’s Westbahnhof, phones excitedly as she walks down the concourse—all the while unaware that a red stocking is slipping out of her pant leg, stretching longer and longer as she continues to walk along. Ultimately, the stocking turns into a ribbon of fabric several meters long and proceeds to wrap itself around bystanders, forming a highly peculiar sort of barrier that, even so, most people blithely ignore, stepping over it or even pretending not to see it at all. The English-language phone conversation, which one hears as a voiceover spoken by Dertnig, revolves around the question of just what a stranger is, as well as where and when a stranger actually becomes a stranger. Her words are the English translation of a subversively comical sketch written in 1940 by the legendary German comedian duo of Karl Valentin and Lisl Karlstadt. S.E.