DER VIENNALE-04-TRAILER

An exhaustive, deceptively simple essay on the complex relationship between cinema and the real world in one and a half minutes. A blue spinning top, no, five spinning tops rotating on a reflecting surface with a butterfly, the sounds of a merry-go-round giving way to all too familiar music; the camera pans upwards, revealing Agnès Vardas motionless face looking down at the action, and from off-screen, her thoughts contradict the music of Strauß, two-fold, in French and in soft broken German: «Ah no, not those Viennese waltzes Im thinking about film, on what happens every day. Im thinking of bread, of salt, earth, corn, bread, the sea, salt.» What follows are images (and sounds) of these essential things, a brief digression, where each take segues into the next, and where there is time to take a closer look at the objects. As if to assure oneself, and because the sea, the bread, the salt look different from up close to from afar.
A dried-out clod of earth becomes a flowering field becomes ripe grain becomes hay becomes a bale of hay, whose curves the camera playfully traces. The bread, the sea, the salt ... and before long, the train of thought ends in a koan: «Once the salt has lost its power, what can it be salted with?» (Christoph Huber)