- This film by Hanne Darboven, better known as an artist who produced installations and drawings, begins with shots of a carnival. Old caravans make an impression, the thin material they are built from, false wood, and the camera moves but is somehow walking much taller than everyone else - it feels a bit like being in the head of a monster. Oddly suitable as a viewpoint to the environs of a funfair, it's fascinating seeing kids jump up into the frame - one holds up a motorcycle helmet on their arm, a strange gesture.
- Then into a town landscape accompanied by classical music - a blank landscape, cigarette adverts, waste ground, cars, cobbles and houses, sunshine in West Germany. The building site is like the funfair - a handheld camera almost held like a waltz, somewhere uncertain, like trying to capture the feeling of walking in a place, that movement of objects past the body, yet the use of jarring music completely takes that feeling away.
there is a manner of reading and approaching something new and unfamiliar as though everything in it was made by god, was perfect, and must be read as such immediately - is it a blank approach, without a context? things do not emerge from nowhere or necessarily have their own consistent internal logic - is the idea a need for tools or values or a philosophy to interpret something? but then these have their limits - so an archipelago of different philosophies, different lenses to add and remove and consider next to one another
- Cycling through different lenses of interpretation. Looking at the frame formally/technically in terms of camera height or failure to expose for indoor light or the use of a fluid zoom; thinking of contemporaneous films by Wenders or Fassbinder which often feature diverting background scenery, this film is like walking into that scenery (Darboven also dedicated an installation to Fassbinder); the landscape of West Germany with ample capital, there are snatches of English, a poster showing a map of New York City; a search for a structural rigour that would be consistent with the artists other works,
clinging to something like the 'ABC' sign on one side of the suburban buildings as an arrow pointing to it.