A face in five panels, black and white and placed in brackets. notes on film 01 else is a report on cinema’s narcotics: visualization and motion, material and montage, and the riddle posed by a face. Understood as the German woman’s name, 'else' could refer to the young actress gazing from the five fields of the split screen, simultaneously object and subject of our voyeuristic desire. It seems as if a screen test were being made; the arranged images from a casting, shot from several different sides and arranged 'cubistically.' The woman moves, turns, poses and plays with the camera, with refusal and surrender, with hesitant invitation and sudden retreat.
The orchestral music reveals itself to be synthetic, as a series of quotations which resemble both epically surging kitsch and modernistic fragility. Everything is in motion, the images, the sound and the text.
A transformation is taking place: The word 'if' begins to disintegrate slowly, to shift and split, and then reform as terms such as 'then,' 'or' and 'else.' A journey into the world of implications, to the subjunctive mood of cinema-
tographic narration, to the Other, foreignness of the filmic, to the present, to the sheer presence of its actors. At its very beginning, this film celebrates, as if in fast forward, the material nature of cinema, quoting avant-garde history, neue Sachlichkeit and Duchamp’s Anémic Cinema, though without becoming nostalgic. notes on film 01 else is in a sense timeless, being equally indebted to early cinema and the postmodern: a screen for projections, black and white and set between brackets, as an incidental remark, a quick note on the bittersweet beauty of the moving image, which preserves time and space. (Stefan Grissemann) Translation: Steve Wilder