Screening of RALFS FARBEN by Lukas Marxt at the Duisburger Filmwoche

RALFS FARBEN
R: Lukas Marxt
DE/AT 2019 | 74 Min.

Screening at Duisburger Filmwoche

Tuesday November 5th, 2019

"Ralf says at one point: “We can’t use the same light, we have to use completely new keys with completely new light and even these can be found to a limited extent”. The schizophrenic man’s words accompany much of this experimental portrait by Lukas Marxt (who worked in close cooperation with Michael Petri over a period of four years), layered over footage of Lanzarote, where the protagonist lives in seclusion. Landscape and cinema form an amalgam here, being both interior spaces of thought and feeling, and projected images of an outside. The thinking of the film’s main character does not run along straight lines, moving instead in circles, spirals, and Möbius strips, shaping the overall structure of the film: the viewer gets lost in this space, in time, in distances, searching in vain for a position in the actual physical sense, finding it instead (and as the result of this uncertainty) in an attitude, a specific formation of thinking which—paradoxically—is permanently moving, in a “succession of changing states” (Deleuze).

Stasis in motion, ongoing but frozen, a painting in time, Rousseau and Tarkovsky, a thought that takes shape in the process of thinking. Documentary? Science-fiction? Mindfuck? It is dizzyingly hard to describe what one sees and hears, because the reality in front of the camera could also be a wholly imagined future, or pictures from a time before cinema. In this film, language, writing, pictures, and music are both understated and exuberant, emptied and too full to generate meaning in the conventional sense. As if asleep, but more awake than ever, we look at the world, Ralf’s world, in which children are “built” and lives are “written,” a “half-fantasy” and a “new life” in which the weather is “recomputed,” like in a movie. Cinematographic madness and a precise portrait of a human being, dancing in the wind of Lanzarote, in the night, in the stroboscopic flickering of a streetlamp, in a completely new light."

Alejandro Bachmann, film scholar

This year the artists film has already been shown at the The Filmfestival Viennale in Vienna, the Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal where it won the Prix des nouveaux alchimistes and the Prix de l'expérimentation MUBI, as well as the International Film Festival in Locarno and lastly this month at the Duisburger Filmweek.  

For further informations visit: www.ralfsfarben.com 

For informations about the artist visit: lukasmarxt.com