“It’s gonna be you,
And me.
It’s gonna be everything you’ve ever dreamed.
It’s gonna be who,
And me.
It’s gonna be everything and everything, we’re meant to be.”
In Helena Wittmann’s DRIFT, two women talk, leisurely and loosely, before one of them sets off for the other side of the planet - slowly but surely stepping off land and into the sea. A distance is drawn; an ocean lies between them. Sensually and synesthetically, a journey is charted, the camera moving with the moods of its characters, sensations plotted with a sensitivity that softens the stoic structure holding it all together. The Dreamed Path — made a year before by a tutor of Wittman’s, the inimitable Angela Schanelec — shares a similar sense of motion, charting another relationship that takes place across a great distance. Sharp and yet also fluid, distant but designed - these are hypnotic, emotive films that lull with their rigour and rhythm, all the while remaining guided by a intuitive visual logic, an unconscious force unto its own. Slipping out to the tranquil terrains of the subconscious and transporting the senses with them, the films (and their viewers) eventually return, alert and anew - a sense of serenity, and of the sublime, irrevocably imbued.
The Dreamed Path (Angela Schanelec | 2016 | Germany | 86’)
DRIFT (Helena Wittmann | 2017 | Germany | 97’)
PUBLICATION - LOST FUTURES 003 - Matt Turner & Patrick Holzapfel
