Viennale Walzer

An exhaustive, deceptively simple essay on the complex relationship between cinema and the real world in one and a half minutes. A blue spinning top, no, five spinning tops rotating on a reflecting surface with a butterfly, the sounds of a merry-go-round giving way to all too familiar music; the camera pans upwards, revealing Agnès Varda’s motionless face looking down at the action, and from off-screen, her thoughts contradict the music of Strauß, two-fold, in French and in soft broken German: "Ah no, not those Viennese waltzes. … I’m thinking about film, on what happens every day. I’m thinking of bread, of salt, earth, corn, bread, the sea, salt." What follows are images (and sounds) of these essential things, a brief digression, where each take segues into the next, and where there is time to take a closer look at the objects. As if to assure oneself, and because the sea, the bread, the salt look different from up close to from afar.
A dried-out clod of earth becomes a flowering field becomes ripe grain becomes hay becomes a bale of hay, whose curves the camera playfully traces. The bread, the sea, the salt ... and before long, the train of thought ends in a koan: "Once the salt has lost its power, what can it be salted with?" (Christoph Huber)

VIENNALE 2004-Trailer