Shot entirely on Super 8, this experimental essay film spans four generations. It explores personal history, life and death, growing up and growing old, and the fleeting glimpses of beauty along the way. The film stock was hand-processed, and sound fragments were recorded on cassette tapes.
Director Statement
Objects in the rear mirror appear closer than they really are has existed in my imagination for many years, just as fragmentary as the resulting images themselves. My approach to film is largely characterized by handmade practices and self-brewing in the context of avant-garde film. Before I attended the Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film, film for me was something that others did, far away in Hollywood. The contact with a radical, analog and handmade film practice opened up a new cinematic space of possibilities for me. While the tradition of structural film and personal cinema had a significant influence on my work, I felt the urge to create a distinct poetic-structural form and a kind of anti-narration – a non-form of storytelling. A form that thinks about its form, a structure that loses itself in itself. A poetic structure and a structural poetry. The film is permeated by a fragility that also reflects my fragile relationship to the medium and to life itself: a constant process of negotiation, never complete, undecidable and impossible to pin down. Working with the material itself – hand-processing, touching, projecting – was and is central for me. It’s not about illustrating a story but about the story of images. Not: what did I see, but what did the material see, what did it experience – in the camera, in the chemical bath, gliding through my hands. This is also reflected on the level of sound: For several years I have recorded various fragments on a Walkman – fragile guitar chords, frail dialogues, church bells ringing, experiments on analog synthesizers – and related them to the images like found material.
The film is also characterized by a coming-of-age process – both personally and artistically. All my experiences of working with analog film culminate in this first feature-length film, which was preceded by many short experimental films. A journey inwards, but also a journey far out, because my hope is that this film is not just about a family but rather about life in general (as Werner Herzog would put it: life itself and death as such): all the dreams, hopes, desires and embitterments of the generations, constantly repeating itself but also constantly producing something new. Also constantly producing new artifacts: written memories, still and moving images, memory objects. The film is also a story about these media dispositives and their complex relationship to memory. It oscillates between abstraction and concretion, content and material, continuity and breakage, determination and aimlessness. An ode to life. In the end, a few images will have remained, as well as the realization: the personal is structural.
Director Biography – Markus Maicher:
*1984 in Klagenfurt (AT), lives and works as a filmmaker and artist in Vienna. Studied at the Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film as well as Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna, ongoing PhD studies at the University of Applied Arts. Since 2022 co-director at the artist-run film lab filmkoop wien, projectionist at the Austrian Filmmuseum and Belvedere, curatorial work in the context of experimental film and lecturer at various universities. Exhibitions and films at national and international festivals and galleries.
