FREM

FREM
by Viera Čákanyová with Martin Kovačík (Czech Republik / Slowak Republik 2019, Englisch,  ST: E, 73’)

At the start: a few analogue pictures, as a sentimental reminder of us, of biological material, of things that once were and the ways we filmed them, before everything disappears. They are followed by a composition of crystal-clear digital images – overhead shots of the endless white expanse of the Antarctic, choreographed tracking shots, flights – revealing interference and digital effects here and there and accompanied by breathing, distorted sound and white noise. Maximum visibility: an eye that nothing escapes because of its potentially limitless focusing power and its ability to look in all directions, meets a landscape in the process of disappearing that is just as razor-sharp and simultaneously precarious as the overpowering, unstable images via which we survey it. Miniature people occasionally appear in the frame, survivors of a catastrophe that took hold of us at some point between the retreat of the dinosaurs and a possible future. FREM is a document, a poetic examination of imaging processes, and a science fiction film in one; with insistent radicality, it weaves together the imaginative realms of art and research, reality and fiction, depiction and the depicted. (Alejandro Bachmann)