LOST FUTURES 003

#003 DRIFT Magazine Template

DRIFT Films By Angela Schanelec & Helena Wittmann

MATTHEW ATKINSON Against The Grain BINGHAM BRYANT The Mirage GRAIWOOT CHULPHONGSATHORN On Ecological Drift PHIL COLDIRON We Lose Control THERESA GEORGE This Is Not The End - Two NICHOLAS HINTZE Come Home SANDER HÖLSGENS Blue Abyss PATRICK HOLZAPFEL The Second Film SIMON LESLEY Postcards From Bavaria BEN NICHOLSON Life/Boat IVANA MILOŠ Sea Songs MATT TURNER Sea Asu Lapis STEPH WATTS Wave Gradients In partnership with The Goethe-Institut, as part of ‘Always Somewhere Else: The Cinema of Angela Schanelec in Dialogue’.

Matt Turner & Patrick Holzapfel

#003 DRIFT “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 every thing and every thing, 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’) LOST FUTURES #003 x Patrick Holzapfel x Maren Hobein 4.30pm, 15th September 2018 Goethe-Institut, South Kensington, London

Off Course Wayward drifts, wind-carried floatations, journeys without a destination.

Ivana MiloĹĄ Ben Nicholson Nicholas Hintze Steph Watts DRIFT (Helena Wittmann, 2017)

Sea Songs Poems, notes and cyanotypes by Ivana MiloĹĄ

As in a (small) mollusc, my shutters, gills, walls open.

I save myself in water, lave with air, burn with sun.

Everything in water is good, alive, warm.

There is no evil in its bosom. (a dream) Cormorant, cormorant, I will let a cormorant carry my soul away, I will rattle seashells, spread a smell of pines and disappear in the ashes of corals. (blessed corals, blessed wet skeletons flowering under the sea.)

The The The The The The The

sea will have all my recesses. sea, tossing, spreading, swallowing. sea will never have another name. sea, making me fish, bird, and butterfly. sea, with nothing but salt, salt, salt. sea, I will sew it covers from the wind. sea, ever nobody’s and mine.

Carpels and Stamens Ivana MiloĹĄ

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I took hold of the sun and my heart beat swift, swift.

Sand Galaxy Ivana MiloĹĄ

O dusks of my isles, rows of oranges over treetops, silent North Star, chirping field companions, vines, vines, you broad fans of grapevines, young olive berries, collards of my smallness, let me have a leaf, just a single leaf I can fit into a ventricle, we’ll push it in through a seashell as if into the sea, so it can float over rocks and skies and each and all.

you get used to the wind of the night and the breakage on the shores.

Seashell Domes Ivana MiloĹĄ

I smell of a seashell.

I smell of seashells, date mussels and smooth clams, of white bora and sea foam.

I am a falling star and a mermaid.

My crests: salt crystals grown together with leaves.

My plumes: quietly shimmering tails.

Stars and sea stars begin underwater.

I count them on my fingers as armfuls of spume calmly elongate my bones.

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life / boat Inspired by Peter Hutton's film At Sea, Ben Nicholson muses discursively, drifting between films and texts.

Beginning. Middle. End. What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?

“The brief span of an individual life is misleading.

Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.”

- J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World

Construction, preparation, planning. First steps. A, B, C. An outline in Prussian Blue.

The hammering of rivets, the silent wheeling of winches, scaffolding holding an incomplete hull in place. Stabiliser(s). A worker stemming the flow of a leak. Teething problems. An idea, or a weakness, nipped in the bud. Get the fonts and spacing right. A fresh lick of paint so that one may go out into the world as expected.

Perhaps a new shirt. Minute engineers make final checks on the rudder. What do you want to be when you grow up? Call sheets. A schedule.

A bottle of champagne to celebrate. Smashed against the hull. A group photograph in uniform with hats. Perhaps tossed into the air, perhaps not. And action.

That wine-blue water. “The world is blue at its edge and in its depths,” says Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

“This blue is the light that got lost.” All at sea. Adrift. The first time we really see the sea in Peter Hutton’s film At Sea is over 22 minutes in. Over a third of the way through. A cut from a rainswept deck surrounded by amorphous slate grey to a closeup of churning water. It may be displaced by our prow as we steer, but it is unconquerable.

To forge ahead we must channel Odysseus’s stubborn spirit, pushing against the current or letting it sweep us away. Do we stick to the script or improvise, let nature take its course?

Check the charts. Continuity.

And then the weather changes.

The cobalt ocean shimmers with light. Glimmers of opportunity and hope. A moment not to be battered by the winds of circumstance, but free to plot a fresh course. The lived life left in our wake forms a beautiful arc in the sunset. A stunning cinematographic composition. And cinema is memory. The lights dim and the sun sets. And the ocean that felt unnavigable looks calm and perfect in the moonlight of nostalgia. Cut.

“And if some god batters me far out on the wine-blue water, I will endure it, keeping a stubborn spirit inside me, for already I have suffered much and done much hard work on the waves and in the fighting. So let this adventure follow."

- Homer, The Odyssey

“The sea will drum in my ears.

The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink.

Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”

- Virginia Woolf, The Waves In her book An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea Erika Balsom observes that in Hutton’s film “bodies appear as minuscule specks relative to the gigantic ship, as if to allegorise the status of human life vis-a-vis the totality of capitalist relations...” There’s perhaps something sadder in the skeletal forms of abandoned ships strewn across the littoral landscape. Zvyangintsev’s whale looms into my mind. No longer seaworthy, no longer of use. A product cast aside.

A work of art long forgotten. Stripped for parts. No do-overs. No reboots. Sat on the shore, our voyage complete, our bloodstream tributaries of the great sea, we stare out at the big blue, longing for life’s unpredictable current.

“Across the still seabed We lie there Fanned by the billowing Sails of forgotten ships Tossed by the mournful winds Of the deep Lost Boys Sleep forever In a dear embrace.”

- Derek Jarman, Blue

At Sea (Peter Hutton, 2000)

Come Home Poem by Nicholas Hintze Illustration by Steph Watts

The bioluminecent waves will wash over us all that isn't a colourful mosaic lost to the ocean floor but bits and pieces of fugacious lives.

-we expected too much-we accepted too muchA shanty town sent from ashore A shanty song about the carcass of our civilisation grimacing just underneath the surface O' the fandangled fish floating through the pulp of mashed up papers and plastics all those important electronics now defunct and of course the briny skeletons of animals and humans unanchored [stunned] by the bright-blue light before they crashed into eternal darkness

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Strange Wavelengths Unknown waveforms, new notations, unexpected fluctuations across sound and space.

DRIFT (Helena Wittmann, 2017)

Bingham Bryant Matt Turner Phil Coldiron Matthew Atkinson Graiwoot Ch.

wave notation Satoshi Ashikawa

“This music could be said to be an ‘object or sound scenery to be listened to casualty.

Not being music which excites or leads the listener into another world, it should drift like smoke and become part of the environment surrounding the listener’s activity.” - Satoshi Ashikawa Wave Notation - a three album series of ‘environment music’ thats run was cut short by the death of its founder and principal theorist, Satoshi Ashikawa suggests a reinterpretation of the idea of background music.

Labelled as ‘sound-design’ rather than music, these soothing, melodic and masterfully composed minimalist albums came as a response to atmospheric music that had become oppressive in its complexity or intensity.

HIROSHI YOSHIMURA Music For Nine Postcards SATOSHI ASHIKAWA Still Way SATSUKI SHIBANO Erik Satie

As Ashikawa explained - in liner notes included with the series first release ‘Music For Nine Postcards’ that must rank as one of the most clear and compelling manifestos ever put to paper - this is music “which by overlapping and shifting changes the character and the meaning of space, things, and people.”

The listener takes a more conscious attitude towards both what they hear, and the environment within which they are hearing it. “The eye points outward; the ear draws inward”, and together, a unique harmony of space and sound is achieved.

WAVE NOTATION 1 Hiroshi Yoshimura - Music For Nine Postcards (1982) With his intimate, harmonious, electronic piano, Yoshimura offers nine melodic interpretations of the views seen from a window looking out - soft sounds producing aural images of the natural world in all its calm and simple splendour.

WAVE NOTATION 2 Satoshi Ashikawa - Still Way (1982) Featuring harp, piano, flute, and vibraphone, A shikawa’s own ultra-minimalist offering is no less resplendent - a series of lilting melodies that rise and fall, and loop and return, forming a clean, crystalline symphony that plays out in the smallest of keys.

WAVE NOTATION 3 Satsuki Shibano - Erik Satie (France 1866 - 1925) (1984) Dedicated to Erik Satie - whose ‘furniture music’ was an inspiration for the series and wider school of sound - these piano songs pitter and patter sonorously, reaching o cc asio n a l p l ate a u s b efo r e returning to a calming centre of quiet tones and soft notes.

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the mirage Bingham Bryant writes on Hiroshi Yoshimura’s ambient LP Music for Nine Post Cards, finding music that whlst made for a space, contains no fixed position.

In 1982 the Japanese sound designer and composer Hiroshi Yoshimura released an LP entitled Music for Nine Post Cards, at the same time initiating Satoshi Ashikawa’s “Wave Notation”, a series that would go on to include contributions by Satsuki Shibano and Ashikawa himself. As is genre’s wont, the terms surrounding this music conspire to pin it, confused and struggling, to a fixed point in space. Satie’s “furniture”, Eno’s “ambient” and its Japanese equivalent, “kankyō” or “environmental” — all imply stasis, music as either dead object or miasma, outside of time and change.

But if this music has a concrete physical state, a form it can perhaps appear in under the half-light of certain lunar phases, it is as liquid, a shifting mass of half-transparent water that eddies and slips, soaks slowly into reality and restlessly turns the whole world into movement in its reflection. It cannot be perceived at proximity, as one’s immediate surroundings, but only gazed at from afar, on land. And it is pregnant with all of the time implied by that distance, by the walk or voyage that one would have to undertake to view it more closely.

A digression: In Edogawa’s Rampo’s 1927 novel The Strange Tale of Panorama Island, Hirosuke Hitomi, an amoral dreamer with artistic leanings, assumes a recently deceased acquaintance’s identity to spend the dead man’s immense fortune on an ambitious and bizarre project: the transformation of an entire island into an eternal and

unchanging paradise, experienced as a sort of massive scroll painting unfurled beneath its visitors’ feet, a spectacle as ridiculous and unnerving as today’s 4-D movies. In the end, Hitomi’s false Eden betrays him. At its center stands a concrete tower, a fixed and total position identifiable with the madman’s aspiration to omniscience. It also contains the clue that will lead to his unmasking — the body of a woman murdered to protect the island’s secrets. Hitomi’s perspective, aspiring to immobility, totality, and the end of time, is revealed as a delusion. The island is reclaimed, by the flow of minutes and years, and by the waves crashing at its shores.

Yoshimura does not make Hitomi’s mistake. His post cards each offer a phrase that is repeated, and that slips and revises in the repeating. If they describe a point from which they originate, that point vibrates under our perception. We see a destination, but it is one that we can never quite reach; we will find it changed when we thought we had arrived. Perhaps this is emblematic of Japanese “ambient” music in general that it is not an immersion, but a journey either imagined or eternally postponed.

Haruomi Hosono’s science-fictional exotica, Inoyama Land’s unmanned submarine plunges or Yoshimura’s humble, laconic post cards from anyspace-whatever all direct our gaze to a mirage, a phantom oasis shifting the ground under our feet in the seeing.

Hiroshi Yoshimura

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Surfacing Underneath You Sea Asu Lapis (Nika Son)

sea asu lapis Matt Turner on a sound piece produced for radio sound art festival RADIOPHRENIA by Nika Breithaupt, a musician, and sound designer on DRIFT. Sea Asu Lapis begins with the sounds of a liquid, a water-music of indiscernible source - either lapping tides or the bubbling of a distant stream. Then a set of keyboard chords slip in, equally gently.

They are the sort of soothing, cycling tones to be found in ‘environment music’, music made for a contained space and designed to blend in, to soak through its wall and become a part of it. The keys make repeating patterns so serene and familiar it sounds less like something made than something that occurs all on its own - sounds that repeat now as they always have, and most likely always will.

Soon the pattern is shifted, and the tones warp into whale song, before being interrupted entirely by the sound of a slamming door and an intrusive voice. Speaking French in slightly metallic tones—like a computer that has received minor water damage— this unseen announcer sends verbal reverberations out like a sonar, clean and quiet, a pattern repeating all the while underneath. Next, seemingly an actual sonar, as shrill calls intermittently pierce through an ambient mix of creaks and croaks, blips, bleeps and pulses - water lapping all the while. It is migraine music .

“Sensing water in your ears and eyes.

Being split by water. Thoughts astray” read Breithaupt's notes for this project, less clues than abstractions. “Your ears on surfaces,” reads the last line. Like the sea sounded out through a shell; the world heard with a head plunged under the water; or the sound made when the shower’s stream makes first contact with the skull and silences everything else,

the impact is abstracted, the noise is distant yet clear. All of the waves blend together and the spoken words become as musical as the water is. The will to listen is replaced by a more passive desire to hear.

The next interlocutor speaks Japanese, then English. “96.5% of the planet’s crust water is found in seas and oceans, 1.7% in groundwater, a fraction in other large water bodies.” Unintelligible communiqués sent under water, they interrupt the liquid waveforms with words and information. A telegram, a distress signal. “Listening to antarctic krill that sway to and fro.” A series of lulling tones start to give way to a more all-consuming drone, split by stray screeches and snippets of speech, dislocated. “Outer voices uttering in displaced languages” as Breithaupt calls them. “Who are you I am? Sinking.”

Language starts to drown itself and all words lose meaning. All sound seems atonal.

The pitch shifts, a deep hum from the darkest part of the ocean. Footsteps, clanking, a crackling fuzz, the repeating rhythms of the eternal tide. “Trying to imagine being underneath a liquid that we call water while clutching to a metal ledge of a big concrete building with air in my lungs."

One last voice from nowhere, lost amidst the deep hiss of water rushing, and finally, some softer incantations.

Another slammed door breaks the spell.

A head bursting above water, gasping for air.

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DRIFT (Helena Wittmann, 2017)

we lose control In an extract from a longer interview originally published on MUBI Notebook, Helena Wittmann tells Phil Coldiron about getting lost in the ocean's waves.

Helena Wittmann: The waves informed me about very different aspects. There is the sunset, filmed from a very low position, close to the water. Throughout the shot, the sun goes down several times as the horizon is shaped by the movement of the waves in the foreground. I needed to wait some days to get this shot, as it only works with a cloudless sky. It tells me a lot about spatial relations and the fact that it is always related to our perspective. This can be transferred directly to the relationship between Theresa and Josefina and the distances between them, but it obviously doesn’t need to be read like this. Through the perspective that I bring into the cinema, every viewer is put into this position and becomes part of this particular relation between space and time.

In the beginning of another shot we see a dolphin very briefly coming to the surface.

In the film, this dolphin gets the role of an ambassador from the depth. For the reflecting characteristics of the water’s surface, this dimension is not visible from above. Therefore it is only the sound and, in this case, the animal that make us recall the space underneath the vast surface of the ocean. This is also a good example for how I chose the extracts within a certain shot. There is more than one dolphin in this unedited shot. But I was

“A story about us feeling very small on this planet and a hidden memory of us growing up in a womb. Surrounded by water, safe and warm”

very aware of the fact, that animals as well as human beings immediately attract attention. If the dolphin would appear in the middle of that shot or was followed by a second animal, it would gain much more importance and therefore shift the meaning. It would no longer be an ambassador with a delicate message, but become another protagonist.

I could talk about every single shot, but I will for now end with the longest one, that is the wavy ocean at night, illuminated by a full moon. For me, the potential of this shot was obvious from the moment I shot it. Strangely enough it is much more difficult to translate its “story” into words. Let me give it a try.

The ocean appears like black ink, oily, moved by the strong wind; the boat runs quickly through it (this again is our position when we watch the film; and it is not a quiet one). Whenever a bigger wave pushes the boat (and with it the fixed camera) to the side, the sky opens up and seems infinite. The moon serves as a huge indirect spotlight that provides a natural vignette inside the image of this enormous space and the bright cool moonlight always focuses our gaze as it travels over the waves and modulates their ever shifting forms.

The story is probably about the tension between this overwhelming vastness and the feeling that it could offer us a kind of shelter. A story about us feeling very small on this planet and a hidden memory of us growing up in a womb.

Surrounded by water, safe and warm, but never being independent. It is as extremely beautiful as it is extremely unsettling. We lose control.

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against the grain Matthew Atkinson examines Liquid Traces, a project that sits under multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture's 'Drift' conceptual framework. “… save and protect gainst / all disaster to sing and or bleat bloated / a stricken boatload far out to scan can you / see riding and pitched at limit of turmoil …”

- J.H. Prynne, Of the Abyss Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani’s 2014 video Liquid Traces: The Left-to-Die Boat Case is a synthetic reconstruction of the trajectory of a dinghy carrying 72 migrants – the titular left-to-die boat – that left Tripoli on 27 March 2011, headed for the Italian island of Lampedusa. Running into trouble, the boat drifted at the mercy of tidal currents for two weeks before landing on 10 April at Zliten, a town some 160 kilometres south-east of Tripoli along the Libyan coast. All but eleven of those aboard had succumbed to hunger, thirst, or strong weather (two more passengers would later die in hospital). Despite placing a satellite distress call and passing through a section of the Mediterranean under cons t ant sur veillance and heaving with commercial, military, and intergovernmental traffic, no other vessels or organisations admitted to seeing the migrants’ boat.

Liquid Traces was produced through Forensic Architecture, a research group at Goldsmiths, University of London that deploys interdisciplinary media practices to scrutinise state power and human rights violations; Heller and Pezzani are also the founders of the monitoring body WatchTheMed, which charts the deaths of migrants in the intermingled jurisdictions of the waters of southern Europe, North Africa, and the Levant.

WatchTheMed has declared the sea “a vast frontier zone”, observing how the technologies of militarised borders and electromagnetic reconnaissance combine

to exercise biopower through the spatial specificities of ‘open’ water. Liquid Traces uses data produced by such technologies, including the automatic identification system positions of merchant and military vessels and satellite imaging of the sea, to accurately plot the leftto-die boat’s course and establish the negligence and irresponsibility shown towards its passengers by the various actors operating in the Mediterranean at the time. These data are deployed “against the grain”, turning the sciences of surveillance and control against their masters to establish guilt and bear witness to the 63 people who died. “What traces might deaths at and through the sea leave?” asks the video’s narration. “How to recreate violations when the murder weapon is the sea itself?”

The United Kingdom is currently negotiating the terms (or lack thereof) of its withdrawal from the European Union, with Britons who fear the curtailing of their ‘freedom of movement’ too often ignoring the lives lost along, within, and through Europe’s borders; a list naming 34,361 migrants who have died while seeking refuge in Europe since 1993 has been displayed, and twice destroyed by vandals, at this year’s Liverpool Biennial. In this climate, Liquid Traces reminds us that to drift as an act of individual sovereignty, to move with deliberate aimlessness at one’s own pace, is a privilege recurrently denied to the oppressed and marginalised. For those deemed illegal or illegitimate, drifting can and does represent a violence exerted through abandon, their lives and bodies permitted to linger, deliberately unseen, through a deathly optic.

on ecological drift Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn looks at drift as an alternate mode of mobility, seeing how this most natural of movements occurs in cinema and in the world.

In September 2017 at “Earth Lab: An Investigation of Earth as Laboratory” symposium, sociologist Bronislaw Szerszynski proposed the notion of drift as an alternative mode of mobility in response to the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch defined by human’s impact on the earth system.

Arguably, the Anthropocene was begun by the Industrialized Revolution, in which humanity finally found ways to take control of nature, entirely. In that revolution, speed and acceleration, combined, became the new form of relationship between humans and the Earth. Humanity experienced a new mode of time and space, through the speed of a railway system. This new experience, however, came with a global-scale extraction of the planet’s resources. The Great Acceleration has changed the Earth’s history, and this destructive power has not stopped, but is now maximized in a scale beyond imagination in the 21st century.

Szersz ynski frames the notion of drift as an antidote to these modes of movement since drift is enabled by the Earth’s primordial power. Drift is always already operated by and in the natural world – how a leaf floats away in a river from one place to another; how a flower’s seed is scattered by the wind and implants and begins to grow a new life. Yet, the main task is to imagine how humans can move with this mode.

Szerszynski’s drift economy is not a stand-alone project, but was adopted through some of the ideas behind artist Tomás Saraceno’s 'Aerocene' project.

One of the outcomes of the project is a solar balloon – a balloon powered and moved by sunlight and wind power. This artistic experiment is one way in which we can imagine a new form of mobility, an imagination greatly needed for the age of the ecological crisis.

Cinema can be a place for us to reimagine, and reconnect with, this primordial power. For me, cinema always has a double contradicting relationship with the earth. Cinema, at its inception, is a medium that records and celebrates ways in which humans control the Earth.

The train in the films of the Lumière brothers is both a celebration of speed and acceleration, and a sad record on the destruction of the earth caused by that same power. However, cinema also allows us to see the non-destructive energy already embedded in the Earth’s system. Apart from the train, the films of the Lumière brothers are famous for presenting wind. If we imagine that winds blow from one film to another, we can see a history of cinematic wind as a catalogue of alternative energy. The wind blows through a sea, allowing objects to drift along in Abbas Kiarostami’s Five (2003). The wind blows with rains so a young woman dances along with it in Naomi Kawase’s Shara (2003). The wind blows gently to a woman who sits with her dying brother in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee (2010).

The earthly element manifests itself, and we are set to drift by it in the first sequence of Carlos Reygadas’s Post Tenebras Lux (2012)....

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Dreamed Paths

Patrick Holzapfel Sander Hรถlsgens Theresa George Simon Lesley

The Dreamed Path (Angela Schanelec, 2016)

Routes without direction, pathways without a clear purpose. Walks upon clouds and drifts into dreamscapes.

A ceaseless happening, allowing only for the collapsing, ever-sinking gazes of the characters and the camera pulsing in this blackout of a film, until all that remains is our helplessness in the face of life. Angela Schanelec’s The Dreamed Path is one of the best films of the year, a film about healing and change, both of which are invisibly stripped in the images, all the while demanding a relationship between the bodies, one that appears and disappears, occurs and evades, succeeds and fails.

The Dreamed Path seems to revolve around two relationships that brush against each other like everything else in this film: not through a great dramaturgical chain of events but spatial simultaneities and gazes. Even so, these relationships are not what is at stake here. Rather, the relationship constellations are the ground we desperately try to keep beneath our feet in order to be able to speak about something we might have only felt; something we have to see again and again. Although we have undoubtedly also seen and heard it, Schanelec works according to the principle of pressing suggestion, meaning she only shows us what really counts, merely hinting at what can be told outside the realm of cinema. As a result, she succeeds in telling everything.

Nevertheless, this brings me back to what apparently must be done in order to allow readers to make any sense of this text: Kenneth and Therese are introduced to us in an image of harmony in Greece: in love, 1984. Then Kenneth gets a call; his mother had a serious accident. An image of shock that we can and cannot relate to: Kenneth’s motionless hands, a seizure, helplessness. Later we learn that he is a drug addict. Then the film jumps thirty years forward, although it never really does.

It remains in between these moments in time. A separation took place; the entire plot of the film could be described in the past tense. Everything in the film was and is at the same time. Coming so close to present images of transience in the very moment we are seeing them is an immense achievement on Schanelec’s part.

Perhaps the fact that the characters never change their costumes makes this possible. At least Therese never does. Thirty years later, we see her wearing the same clothes, which cling to her like an echo of the film’s beginning,

giving her appearance a tinge of unreality; as if her clothes were a memory or the standstill itself. It is almost akin to Marguerite Duras: memories die in every image and desperately hang on to the life that the camera looks for in the bodies and ultimately finds only in children.

As demonstrated by an impressive shot of a little girl licking the blood off a disabled boy’s knee in a swimming pool because spittle will help the bruise heal, children have not yet started wearing grown-up clothes. They touch those who need healing. Seeing children as a counterpart or using them as a frame or metaphor, as Valeska Griesebach does in Longing or Corneliu Porumboiu in The Treasure, has become too much of a stale trick in cinema.

Schanelec’s final shot reveals nothing new in this regard, although she keeps it in the field of ambivalence.

Another stor y in this film: the actress Arianne. She abandons her life, her husband and daughter; her husband moves away; we see her working on a film. Everything passes without a word, recalling the last shots of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates. The weather changes too. What began in sunshine ends in rain. If it weren’t so painfully casual, it could almost be a feature of melodrama. But it’s just the weather, just chance, just fate, just banality. It is a movement with no particular reason; the humans that perform and carry it through this film are what tie it together. It is everything and nothing at once.

One shot towards the end of the film reveals this emotional film in all its perceptual brutality: Arianne telling the story of her background under an umbrella, sounding resigned. There is no lift to her voice anymore, no healing. This shot is followed by an image of the place where we normally see Kenneth, living on the street next to the metro station together with his dog. But now he is nowhere to be seen. His dog is standing in the street alone. The image right after the next (sound) cut is like a shot to the heart: an ICE train speeds past the camera way too close for comfort; we hear the sound, the railroad tracks. In the following shots, we see a shoe lying next to the tracks. Something disappeared. Something else disappeared in this film, at the very beginning.

on finding lost time

The Dreamed Path (Angela Schanelec, 2016)

In an extract from a longer article originally published on MUBI Notebook, Patrick Holzapfel looks at healing and change in Angela Schanelec's The Dreamed Path

DRIFT (Helena Wittmann, 2017)

The Dreamed Path (Angela Schenelec, 2016)

blue abyss Sander Hölsgens looks at the colour blue - as it appears in DRIFT, with blues so deep they absorb all light; and The Dreamed Path, where blue is in the margins.

How seldom humans have backed away from this space of reveries and horror.

It’s our bluest catastrophe. The sea – an expanse, a rush. We turned it into our fold of waterways, jellyfish and shrinkwrapped coconuts.

The lakes and seas and swimming pools in Angela Schanelec's The Dreamed Path appear blue only at their margins. The film’s tenor is urban, green, human. It is a piece of close-ups tailored to human proportions; its watery worlds take the form of an empty line in a forgotten notebook – they are anthropomorphic if not human-made. This dream-film makes visible how the world touches us.

By attuning itself to Gaia’s cadence, her measure becomes cinematic and thus human. Everything The Dreamed Path draws into its spell, falls silent – as if the mysteries of this blue planet can only be seen, rather than heard or felt or dreamt.

The film’s bluest moment takes place in a hospital, with its Egyptian blue blankets and fluorescent tubes. It’s a waterless abyss where blue is an aftereffect of eyesight, inasmuch as it conditions the filmer’s gaze.

In Helena Wittmann’s DRIFT, no wave is intended for the surfer, no well for a fisher: facing up to the deep-blue ocean, the filmer and her camera are a caring resonance chamber. They seem to listen to how the sea swallows our waste and leaves no trace of it (except when one dares to look underneath its surface).

Its crystalline edges no longer share the salty and affective composition of blue tears, but produce the toxic taste of

microplastics. Though not at all a project of environmental activism, DRIFT is hesitant to render the sea in marine blue. At times, the film’s documentation of this expanse is physically dark, as dark as an X-Ray. DRIFT’s surf reflects hardly any light, but absorbs it, as though that’s all it is capable of in the age of the anthropocene.

DRIFT and The Dreamed Path care for the earth and its inhabitants. But in the hands of humanity, this blue place is losing its colour.

Blue. Its variations are infinite. Maggie Nelson (2009: 1) fell in love with the colour as though it were spell she ‘fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns’. Carol Mavor writes that it is a bruising colour that indicates injuries that are skin-deep… neither inside nor outside the body. Joan Didion (2011: 4) reminds us that ‘blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning’.

But in DRIFT and The Dreamed Path, the colour blue radiates bruising debris and their tides, or that which we once recognised as a sea.

References Didion, J. (2012). Blue Nights.

London: Fourth Estate.

Mavor, C. (2012). Black and Blue. Durham: Duke University Press.

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the second film Patrick Holzapfel on psychological drift and cinemagoing, on what it means to remember and forget films, or to lose them and then to remember them anew.

How to not forget what we feel after watching a film? How to feel, think, touch what it moves in us? How to find a way of approaching what we’ve just heard and seen? There are those who count on the immediate act of talking. They, for example, love to retell a film and share all their observations, forming their opinion while speaking. It begins already during the credits. Their energetic, saw-like voices wake you up from the dream on the screen. They have to share in order to believe, they have to get it off their chest in order to keep it.

Then there are those who want to talk about something else, even something completely different. It seems to me that they are trying to forget what they have just felt. Like a squirrel does with its nut, they want to bury what they felt a moment ago. Keep it for another time.

I look into their eyes, watch their hands move and do not find any trace of the film we have just shared. There are also those that remain silent. Maybe they stand or sit smoking a cigarette, maybe they take a slow walk through the city where they continue living in the film. What they just experienced echoes through their steps and thoughts. I often see them. They never see me. Sometimes they even begin imitating the moods and manners of the film, suddenly they speak like the characters, they try to make their life a part of the film.

For me, there is no other way to explain the behaviour of Maria, a troubled friend of my teenage years. She was one of those girls that were constantly on the move, trying to reinvent themselves with every new day. What I now recognize as a clear sign of the insecurity of youth

was then - when I myself was affected by the same insecurities - just exciting. The air she had about her promised there was more to life than what we knew.

Yet she was very hard to approach, endowed with a cold indifference that protected her from having to share anything. Nevertheless, many of my friends dated her and came closer to her than I, in a way afraid of this woman, could have imagined. After a while, the usual while in which young boys try to find patterns in everything, especially related to interpersonal contact, we found out how it worked. The friends who successfully asked her to go out always did so after the cinema or they at least asked her to go to the cinema together. There, an almost uncanny transformation took place in Maria.

When she flitted into the cinema she was cold and invisible, cynical and arrogant, but as soon as she came out (that is, if you picked the right film) she had big eyes and a fierce belief in the power of love, which led her to hover into their open arms with seducing vulnerability.

Maria was imitating the film and it must have been such a pleasure to be part of that imitation. At least until she forgot the film again.

Thus it is still of importance to ask how to not forget a film. Shall we write down our feelings, try to find what we have seen in words? Shall we read texts about the film, study background information and try to prolong our experience? We can always tell ourselves that we are going to see the film again. But do we really come back to our first experience at all? Do we try to prolong and repeat our experience in order not to forget?

survive in us as subconscious memories, maybe we dream about the film, maybe something of the film suddenly reappears like a flash because of a madeleine in the real world or just another image that makes us think about the film.

Nobody reminds us of those images.

There is no app, no newsletters, there is only us. When they say that cinema is a social place, the same is not true for the intimacy of forgetting.

A film loses weight with each forgetting; gains with each remembering. A famous film critic once stated that he can judge a film best the morning after he has seen it. It is true that we often see films that we find to be beautifully made, that bring us a lot of pleasure, that seduce and seemingly touch us and yet one day we can barely remember them. Some might also immediately see the next film. Everything is a series. It is a part of our fragmented way of looking at things today. Who is actually listening to the wind that blows through when we snap a book shut? There is a similar sound after each film. Do we want to drown our emotions in ecstasy? Would Stendhal have any sensations at all walking through the Florence of today? Or would it just be one big overwhelming knot of impressions through which no syndrome could develop because no beauty could be seen? There is always more and more, we are waiting for the next dose until we have lost ourselves in a labyrinth of fictions and worldviews without ever having to think about what all this has to do with our self or the world.

Maybe there are those who take cinema very seriously and those who just want to have fun with it. For the latter it may be fun to forget those images that sometimes seem more real than the images we receive from reality despite

being less cruel. Maybe that is the reason we shouldn’t forget them.

A sister of my grandmother lost her memory around the time she turned 77. When I was a little boy, her husband did not tell me about the cruelty of this forgetting but rather about the little miracles it brought with it. He told me how he observed his wife, on one of those comfortable Sunday afternoons they used to share every week, watching the same film twice in a row. It must have been one of the rare mistakes in the history of German television where normally everything is planned through and through to avoid angry people calling because of a tragic mistake committed by a machine. How to survive when a broadcast begins five minutes late?

How to drink a beer when the sound of the football match is muted? How to relax when there is a war going on and a special program delays a favourite television series? Be that as it may, the sister of my grandmother, as observed by her husband, had no such thoughts.

If he told me which film she saw, I must have forgotten, though I remember he described to me how she had the exact same reactions to the film when she saw it the second time. The same gestures, the same laughs, the same comments she made. He was certain that she saw the film exactly as she did the first time.

This anecdote fascinates me to this day. I often find myself dreaming about seeing and feeling things as if it were the first time and yet, at the same time, I don’t want to forget what it felt like when it actually happened the first time. Perhaps every one of us should be equipped with a huge key ring with a key for each memory, making us tinkle heavier and heavier until we die but allowing us to open those invisible doors to faces and places that have once touched us as long as we live..

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Theresa George

this is not the end

Adapting notes from her own diary and from memories from the time, DRIFT’s cowriter and actress Theresa George ru minates on the journey of the film.

I was only at sea for fifteen days, but that was enough for me to be transformed.1 Now I’m back here and have disguised myself as a Hamburg native. On my way to you, through the city, I put up the hood of my winter coat, a little bashful, a little wild.

Now and then I throw a glance at my cell phone, but my eyes secretly keep going up to the sky, where the clouds float aimlessly.

I am drifting.

Ben op drift.

I am aground.

Zit aan de grond.

I am on fire.

Brand aan bord.2

I am sinking.

Ship zinkt.

The train comes, I get in.

4.15.2016 - Selwyn is standing on the pier. He’s wearing a light linen dress, baseball cap, and sunglasses. As a goodbye, he says: “This is not the end.” Then we hang up.

Like you, Selwyn lives in a house with a view of the harbor. His life at sea has taught him how to say goodbye. Wanting to learn from him, I practice.

We lie in bed, talking. On this night, you remember hunting for octopus on a foreign coast as a child. A story told by one sentence. A picture. I stay.

The place where I’m hoping for pearls and coral is here.3 Luminescent water shimmers through the letters. My body becomes light and languid. – And there it is, an octopus!

(An animal with eight tentacles and an enormous head that swims as if it were breathing deeply, in and out.) I look at it and he looks back at me. We sit in the bathtub and look at each other. I think I am recognizing/discovering your gaze again.

“The ‘we’ is a species, it’s like when you roll the dice or when you cast your line, when a fisherman casts his line; perhaps there is a ‘we’ on the other side? It’s a promise, it’s a request, it’s a hope. It can also be fear.”4 So, the hope-filled relationship of the fisherman to the fish. You with your trident, on the hunt. Fear of catching something, fear of catching nothing, that’s how I imagine it. Because you sense that a successful hunt means that a desire, a hope, would also end. And you know, of course, that there are desires that only have meaning if they remain desires.

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I would like it if my story could speak on the surface, so that it resembles you, becomes pretty. In English, I could say: “to draw” and “to be drawn to”.5 That describes the tension I sense between me and your story. 1) I think it up myself and add others to it, because and so that I’m drawn to it. 2) I tell it to myself – using up the ink – to get rid of you, since you’re not here anymore. 3) I already missed you as we were lying next to each other.

When a child is born, it gets an octopus twin somewhere in the ocean.6 The sun is shining, your brothers are in the water, too. High-rises tower within sight of the beach and the harbor. You live in one of them, way up near the top. The 1970s are drawing to a close. You remember. I sit next to you. I watch you. You are concentrated and nervous.

The octopus hasn’t appeared yet and, despite everything, it will be a chance encounter.

At roughly the same time, in cold Paris, William Burroughs screams mid-detox: “Am I an octopus...?”, unnumbered pages covered in scribbles spreading around him like tentacles. He screams, but you wouldn’t hear him.7

MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY This is Burroughs PCUV (Papa Charlie Uniform Viktor) MAYDAY Burroughs PCUV The Echo Sounder lost bottom.

The 1970s are drawing to a close and capsized boats are over there in the other dock.

A storm has caught them by surprise. Whoever took photos of them had solid ground under their feet. You show me pictures of it in bed in your apartment at the Hamburg harbor. Taken from the balcony of your high-rise apartment. After over thirty years, these shipwrecks are now getting a new spectator.8 Someone who cocoons herself in warm pillows and blankets as she spectates.

STORMY – RAINY – CHANGE – FAIR – VERY DRY But I was once on board a sailboat myself. There, I kept vigil/dreamed in my bunk as if I were passing through your foreign coast. I wrote: DAY 5 - Fell asleep to a weird sound, a hidden track that I hadn’t heard before. An endless gurgle and gentle chiming, as if hundreds of goats were grazing in the distance. It gently mixed in with the din on the ship and the waves, I couldn’t tell anything apart anymore. There was a lot of fear, the chiming of the bells was a delusion. But calming they were, the undulating swells on this night.

A B B A B A B A B A B A B A B A

Am I still writing to you?

I am just a promise, I am a request, I am a hope.

What happened?

The horizon is in the waves.

Where?

Still 250 NM away from the harbor.

Who’s so far away?

A seagull. She’s gotten lost and is already losing strength.

How long yet?

She’ll have to fly for two more days and will stay near the boat.

Which boat?

Our boat, it’s been sailing for two weeks now.

Where are you coming from?

From the Caribbean islands.

Why did you leave?

All of us want something different.

Footnotes 1 On the ship on which I dreamed and kept vigil, I followed the tracks of those whom today we call ‘explorers’.

Although they experienced the Atlantic swell, they were far away from a “wet ontology” (Steinberg/ Peters 2015a, 2015b) and did their theories on land. The sea only reinforced the distance between themselves and the “others”, which they tried to expand through writing.

2 Note that the “ship” becomes the capital I, the I that is sinking. – Taken from the printed “Noodprecudures” on board the Chronos, which sailed under the Dutch flag, but on which mainly German tourists were transported across the Atlantic, including ourselves, the DRIFT team.

3 This image is from the anthropologist Michael Taussig, who often uses maritime metaphors to support his thoughts while writing. He links the hope for “pearls and corals” with ethnographic field notes and writes: “The allusion to pearls and coral suggests that a notebook is likely to transform the everyday into an opalescent underwater world where laws of motion are suspended.” (2011: 103) 4 Quote from Jacques Derrida from the documentary film “D’ailleurs Derrida” (Fathy 2000).

5 See Taussig 2015.

6 This belief of Indonesian sea nomads is explored by Florian Kunert in his film “Oh Brother Octopus” (2017). ⁷ He would remain unheard, not least because people cannot speak underwater, which might seem extreme to other living creatures, as Stefan Helmreich writes: “Humans might be imagined as aerophile – air lovers: an extreme from the vantage point of anaerobes.” (2012: 1129) ⁸ This is of course an allusion to Blumenberg’s treatise “Shipwreck with Spectator”, in which he negotiates philosophical viewpoints with the help of maritime metaphors.

Sources Blumenberg, Hans (1997): Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer - Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.

Fathy, Safaa (2000): D’ailleurs Derrida [Film]. 68 Minuten.

Helmreich, Stefan (2012): Extraterrestial Relativism. In: Anthropological Quarterly 85/4, Special Collection: Extreme: Humans at Home in the Cosmos,1125–1140.

Kunert, Florian (2017): Oh Brother Octopus [Film]. 27 Minutes.

Peters, Kimberley and Steinberg, Philip (2015a): Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking. In: Society and Space 33/2, 247-264.

Peters, Kimberley and Steinberg, Philip (2015b): A Wet World: Rethinking Place, Territory, and Time. Online essay: http://societyandspace.org/2015/04/27/a-wet-world-rethinking-place-territory-and-time-kimberley-petersand- philip-steinberg/ (last visited on 06.30.2018).

Taussig, Michael (2011): I swear I saw this: drawings on fieldwork notebooks, namely my own. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Mount Tegelberg. Bavaria, Germany. Simon Lesley

Postcards from Bavaria Photographs by Simon Lesley

Lake Alpsee. Bavaria, Germany. Simon Lesley

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003 - DRIFT LOST FUTURES x Goethe-Institut Special Thanks to: Ben, Bingham, Cornelia, Danny, Graiwoot, Helena, Ivana, Patrick, Phil, Maren, Matthew, Nicholas, Nika, Sander, Simon, Steph, Theresa.