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Beyond the pleasure
of watching lies the pleasure of understanding, a non-directed understanding
which is able to discover, beneath the redundancy of visual informations,
its own way of watching.
The idea of the "frozen picture" (freeze frame) taken seriously.
Peter Tscherkassky
Freeze Frame is the best example of a filmic signifier from which
the transparency and invisibility has been removed. Material which has
been repeatedly re-filmed (a construction site, a rubbish incinerating
plant, industrial graveyards, an antenna and line-drawing like frame that
continually falls over) are exposed on top of each other. The result is
that an unambiguous reading of the picture, to say nothing of their positioning
in a fictive room cannot even be attempted. This type of calculated picture
removal is carried to the point where the film strip is stopped in the
projector (and hence the title) and burns.
Michael Palm
The visual background material for Freeze Frame consists of shots
taken in a "redevelopment area" in Berlin, i.e. old buildings
shortly before their demolition, filmed through a loo window which repeatedly
slides in front of the houses like a shutter; shots from a construction
site in Frankfurt; as well as of an incineration plant — the anus,
as it were, of a city — where one can watch a huge grip arm and a
worker pushing the garbage around. These pictures are set in contrast
to pictures of visitors and participants at a neighborhood street festival,
the kind where the city attempts to conceal itself behind a poor imitation
of village charm. While the visual material is taken to the brink of collapse,
the symmetry of urban architecture has drifted into the macrostructure
of the film: with the A-B-C-D-C-B-A structure of its visual motifs, Freeze
Frame has identifiable edges and a center. But I even dissolve this
macrostructure in a finale in which the "edge" destroys itself
and opens to the pure light of the projector lamp.
Peter Tscherkassky
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, acquired Freeze Framefor
their permanent collection. |
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