Bolds of Lightning
The Sixth Sense:
If two letters in the original German title of Dietmar Brehm´s new film were changed, it could be translated as Glances. The result would be coordinates of a mode of vision in which subject and object oscillate: A glance triggers flashes of lightening in the brain; synaptic activity during a dream replaces the glance. A man opens his eyes. He sees a cozy room with a burning fireplace; he sees an elderly person lying in the bed and then turning to ring for a servant; he sees a woman taking a shower, and a younger one in bed asleep. Suddenly, all order is reversed. It may be that the woman is merely dreaming of a voyeur; she may be entering REM sleep. She might be dreaming herself into an altered version of Psycho. The feeling of discomfort caused by Bolts of Lightening is made possible by the relevance Brehm adds to his found footage: He permits the telling of a story which is turned completely around and, as in a dream, the story is nothing more than a subsequent synthesis of images which appear suddenly; beauty and transience are not just subjects, they are also a quality of the film´s images.
(Bert Rebhandl)
Dietmar Brehm´s BLITZE which evokes disturbing, sexually loaded associations between fragments of grainy, sepia-toned found footage- which pretty well sums up most of his films. But this one seemed less aggressive, less "dark" than much of his earlier work, and more directly tied to the (ill-)logic and symbolism of dreams.
(William Wees on Views from the Avantgarde NYFF 2000)
In Blitze, Dietmar Brehm generates a sordid Kuleshov effect, where the face of the voyeur is transformed by being watched. The impact of the gaze is marked by lightning bolts as the voyeur opens his eyes to a series of images, illicitly watching peoble in their beds.
(Catalog of the 9th Brisbane International Film Festival 2000)
Blitze
2000
Austria
7 min