Buildings

Film, in the form of long black ribbons of film stock is, as we know, on the way out. In this manipulable form, vaguely bulky and liable to break, bend or become tangled, it is becoming a museum object, a relic of a bygone era, a souvenir. This sudden relegation is obviously all the more ironic in that these tapes were intended to be archival, and preserved, like the bandages (as has been said many times) on mummies. It is a meditation on the cross-convolutions of time and memory, on the silver film medium itself that Johannes Hammel conducts here, in a way that is both scholarly and playful. A character, an amateur filmmaker, takes us around the planet, depending on his journeys, but also within the unaccustomed temporal dimension of his own aging, in other words, of the very interlacing of his existence on film. (JPR)