Journey to an absolute vantage point

One side of a hanging projection screen displays a single continuous black and white shot of three musicians playing an original piece of music. It’s a sorrowful and dramatic piece and it’s sound echoes throughout the gallery. When you move to the other side of the screen there is another film, edited to the musicians music. In it we see slow and considered observations of the baroque gardens of Schloss Charlottenburg in West Berlin on a sunny Autumn day. This film has a voice-over, spoken in English by a German actress, that describes a meeting between a man and a woman whose goal it is to exchange information for unrevealed purposes. Dramatic tension is built with words and music to create an intense open-ended narrative about these characters that we never see. This story is infused with references to other artists and art works including Caspar David Friedrich, Beethoven and Alain Renais’ ‘Last Year at Marienbad’. Part romance, part spy film, part documentary, the relationship between the music, the images and the narration changes throughout the film becoming tenuous at times. After a pivotal moment in the story where the characters leave each other we are led back to the story’s origins. The musicians stop playing and their image momentarily cuts to black while the other film’s images seamlessly loop. The music and story gradually begin again.