After the large-scale 'Paradise Trilogy', Ulrich Seidl's latest film essay 'In the Basement' will be released in theaters in autumn 2014. It marks the director's return to documentary form. 'In the Basement' is a nocturnal journey through the subterranean layers of the Austrian psyche: it explores brass music and opera arias, expensive furniture and cheap male jokes, sexuality and sadism, fitness and fascism, snakes and weapons, as well as love and the longing for it. The film is accompanied by this book, which aims to highlight the specific aesthetics and the socio-political dimensions of Seidl's tableaux through film stills and texts. Selected subjects from this exploration of Austrian single-family home basements communicate with texts from selected film critics, philosophers, psychologists, writers, and essayists.