WHERE DO WE GO
The dynamic performance of drummer Jörg Mikula serves as the trigger for a new work by Siegfried Fruhauf that explores the reciprocal relationship between the two time-based media of film and music in a wild way. WHERE DO WE GO reveals itself to be a synesthetic experiment rendering sight as rhythmical and the visual edit as musical. The filmmaker painstakingly animates brief phases of movement recorded with a Lomography Supersampler* to create a visual series of trains, tracks, bridges and nature that are re-constellated and brought together in a multiple split-screen projection. He edited individual photographic fragments into a continuous stream of images, a perforated time space continuum in which the motion of one image seems to be transported to the next image, expanding and contracting in space. Horizontal and vertical lines serve as points of orientation that stabilize the image. Additionally, Fruhauf employs structuralist strategies, proceeding analytically and playfully at one and the same time. He reacts to shifts in rhythm and pitch with visual multiplication, mirroring, and serial sequencing so that the pulse of the drumbeat is not just synchronized with the montage but rather the whole visual space starts to dance. With mathematical precision, he pieces together a landscape that synchronously unfolds to the sound of the drums, allowing structures and forms to come into focus. It is an iridescent play of lines, colors, and surfaces that leads with an accelerating tempo ever more deeply into abstraction, till all that can be recognized in the end are vibrating patterns causing the whole body to vibrate. The multipartite variable split-screen and leaps in motion are reminiscent of Muybridge´s early photographic studies and the origin of cinematic illusion. With WHERE DO WE GO, Fruhauf further develops his structuralist cinema, focusing on the rhythmic quality of montage and the continuity of something in between, to transmit the original fascination of motion pictures. (Shilla Strelka)
*The Lomography Supersampler is a photo camera that records four consecutive moments as four adjacent images onto one frame of 35mm film.
Translation: Eve Heller
WHERE DO WE GO
2018
Austria
4 min