Guy Ben-Ner

Moby Dick
Video, transferred to DVD, 12:35min., colour, silent, 2000

In Guy Ben-Ner’s version of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, the artist’s home kitchen becomes the stage for this legendary adventure on the high seas. Everything that his kitchen contains Ben-Ner includes in his adventurous hunt for the legendary white whale. Kitchen cupboards become cabins, and baby baths are turned into lifeboats. Even his family is not spared – they are cast as actors. It is especially this home-made character of the work, which uses tricks from early silent movies, that makes this amazingly simple film so irritatingly funny.

Melville’s novel, which was published in 1851, tells the story of the fateful journey of the whaling ship Pequod. Driven by blind hate, its captain, one-legged Ahab, hunts the white sperm whale. Similar to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Cervantes’ Don Quijote, the rough outline of the story of Moby Dick is still familiar to many people, although not so many have actually read the original book.

Moby Dick has been imprinted in the collective memory of society as a legend, and various generations have used it as a projection screen for their ideas of freedom, hunting, and adventure. For example, Moby Dick played an important role for the German RAF terrorist group, which recognised itself in the tale’s struggle of a small group against the mighty whale – for them, the all-powerful state – and they named their members after the story’s heroes: Ahab stood for Baader, and Starbuck, the first helmsman, for Holger Meins.

Ben-Ner, too, only takes the rough outline of the novel’s story, which most people remember. By really getting into the story, and relocating it to his home, he examines what meaning the legend of the white whale can have nowadays as a projection screen – even for the fantasies of freedom and adventure of a family guy.

Katharina Fichtner


... back