Kassa Track

The title sequence is already mildly irritating. Cursive letters with a metallic luster reminiscent of B movies spell out the words KASSA TRACK. The linguistic blending of German and English partly intimates the nimble collage strategy employed by the artist collective responsible for the animation and realization of the film.

One bird´s eye-view shot shows solely the hands of a person tending a supermarket cash register, receiving and scanning objects. Radically different stylistic and technical methods were used by the artists who contributed individual statements to this project (Parastu, Line Finderup Jensen, Adnan Popović, Juri Schaden); the montage is similarly unconventional in its resistance to a linear narrative. The artists no doubt share a fundamental mistrust of our affluent society; the supermarket conveyer belt becomes a metaphor for unquestioning consumerism, showcasing diverse irritations as well as more gross disturbances. When a cashier takes a cigarette break, the unsupervised objects on the conveyer belt pile up into a growing mountain of chaos. A person is suddenly lying on the belt and gets swallowed up by the apparatus. Cut-off hands are soon seen moving along instead of vegetables and fruit. The functional world of consumerism is visually dismantled, reaching highpoints in the zombie-like arms of a skeleton or when missing data in a digital montage sequence is replaced by color test images: Even the most familiar visual logic breaks down in this playful experimentation with trash aesthetics, and a dash of humor is consistently part of the mix. The film music composed by Vinzenz Schwab connects the contrasting visual sequences and oscillates between realistic acoustics recorded on location and electronically manipulated sequences and sounds. (Thomas Renoldner)

Translation: Eve Heller