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Good News or: Of Paperboys, Dead Dogs, and Other Viennese (Good News oder: von Kolporteuren, toten Hunden und anderen Wienern) (1989/90) is a dialectic essay in which the squalid conditions of South Asian immigrants who sell newspapers in Vienna's outer districts are juxtaposed with observations of well-to-do Viennese tabloid readers. Seidl's camera captures the pathetic subjects in stylised tableaux, lingering within static frames for uncomfortable lengths of time. This technique, although still evolving in this film, marks Seidl's later documentaries with ever greater effectiveness. Its roots are essentially twofold: (i) Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, a theatrical device in which an irritating distance between the actors and the audience creates a critical space and (ii) a tradition of “painterly” cinema, critically articulated in various forms from Münsterberg and Balázs to Bazin, which emphasises long takes and deep focus. Seidl's appropriation of this painterly cinema amounts to its deconstruction, however. Whereas Bazin praised Rossellini's Paisà (1946) for its depiction of a staged event in a “realistic” cinematographic language (long takes, deep focus), Seidl uses these techniques in his documentary films to achieve the exact opposite effect – that of a stylised, plastic world. In this sense Seidl is also working against the contemporary equation – in documentary reportage as well as in the Dogma '95 cinema – of a shaky camera with the “real”.