Exploration

The word "exploration" can refer to both an "examination" and "discovery". The film with this title deals with both meanings simultaneously in a kind of thematic concentration: An examination is shown in a manner which explores the aspect of revealing. The examination is psychiatric in nature, a conversation between an analyst and an analysant. The result of such an examination is normally a clinical picture, a description of an illness. But something is wrong with this examination, and from the beginning this something goes beyond the camera´s mere presence. What´s wrong must involve the way in which the conversation is depicted, which prevents a unified picture (of either a condition or something else, something like a presence within a picture) from developing. The camera isolates both figures in nearly static medium closeups as they talk, occasionally at cross-purposes.
Obviously the focus is more on what separates them rather than the uniting aspect of the conversation - more specifically how the statements are understood and the way in which questions are answered. One could almost say that, while pictures are produced, the position of the final one, the picture which assigns the final meaning to the preceding and subsequent pictures, is kept open. As a result, not only the positions of analyst and analysant are uncertain and ultimately interchangeable, both the film´s apparently neutral stance with regard to the statements and that of the audience are qualified. Something is not quite right - in particular concerning the presumedly unproble-matic link between seeing, hearing and understanding which is explored in Exploration.

(Vrääth Öhner)

Translation: Steve Wilder