From the first days of cinema and the Lumiere brothers’ Arrival of a Train cinema has always enjoyed a complex relationship with reality. The camera captures truthfully what is in front of it, yet when projected onto a cinema screen it becomes a reflection of that event that can sometimes be convincing enough to be accepted as real. This supposedly happened in a literal sense for the Lumiere’s film when audiences fled a screen locomotive in the belief it would crash into them, but as audiences became more aware of what they were watching this acceptance became voluntary, and spectators instead able to allow themselves to be drawn into what they know to be a constructed world on the screen. In this way cinema’s most common use shifted from the documenting of real life to the telling of telling of narratives in a specially constructed world that can be based in ‘real life’ or purely imagined.

Despite the development of cinema’s relationship with illusion it has never fully shaken its connection to the real world: the documentary never died out and to this day audiences retain a strange fascination with images from ‘reality’. There is something innately powerful about seeing an event happen onscreen with the knowledge that what is taking place is not staged but life happening before your eyes. From pornography to footage of suicides and jihadist beheadings, knowing that the people in footage are actually having sex or dying changes the way in which we view them. Only recently the suicide of a teenager broadcast live on the Internet was given prominent coverage in the mainstream media here in the UK. In general it would seem that most of the internet video clips which find the largest number of viewers tend to be those which provoke a physical reaction in those who see them, such as laughter, in the embarrassing You’ve Been Framed-style clips, arousal in pornographic clips, or discomfort and fear in those of grizzly deaths or accidents. Though they are not always the most famous moments in movie history, documentary has given cinema some of its most powerful moments and striking images. From a man being force fed through a tube up his nose in Frederick Wiseman’s The Titicut Follies (1967) to Arthur Agee lifted aloft by his team mates after his basketball team reach the state final in Hoop Dreams (1994).

It is this documentary horror that Ulrich Seidl imbues Import/Export with, both in literal and stylistic terms. The film is shot on digital video and uses natural light. Seidl uses long takes in which he edits through camera movement rather than with cuts, reproducing the impression of fly on the wall observational documentaries and real time continuity. This sense of time becomes crucial in heightening the feeling of unease in scenes. He begins with an early scene where Paul brings a large dog to his girlfriend’s flat even though he knows that she is afraid of it, and continues with Olga’s brief stint as a webcam sex worker. Though Seidl doesn’t show the lead actresses genitalia explicitly when Olga masturbates for the internet porn site, the shot itself is static as if it were a webcam. Beyond the point of view which implicates the viewer by putting them close to the position of the paying Western customer who barks his orders angrily in German, the lack of cuts creates an acute awareness of time which makes an uncomfortable scene grow more agitating with each second that passes. This technique is repeated when Michael picks up a prostitute and humiliates her in his hotel room,

What Seidl has realised is it is possibility that creates true horror. Documentary by its very nature deals in the possible and as such it is the true genre of horror. Wasn’t a significant portion of Herzog’s hit documentary Grizzly Man (2005) set aside to discussing the idea of listening to a man being eaten alive by a bear? And can fictional horror really conjure up anything more chilling than listening to the (subsequently executed) sociopath David Harris talk about his life in The Thin Blue Line (1988)? If cinema transports us to another world where we will see and experience things beyond our own lives and experiences then documentary cinema does so whilst all the more strongly reminding us that our lives are connected to the stories we see, and that one day the train really might come out of the screen.