Heavy Eyes
A kind of white noise weighs heavy over this film, which is revealingly titled Heavy Eyes: Digital rain overshadows the (formerly) analogue film material. These wild proliferations of images seem to have been scribbled or scratched, and spots spread across them like sores taking over human bodies, and corroding faces: This is a cinema of abstraction and Neo-Expressionism. Ghostly and mask-like faces appear (and disappear again immediately in the digital fog), eerily duplicated, electronically cloned. The nervous, gracefully constructed soundtrack provides a matching synthetic, haunting accompaniment. The roughly outlined animation soon becomes more concrete — resembling a tracing or overdrawing of found film images in which trembling figures can be seen in anonymous urban landscapes, a girl stands at a window, a young man grins into space, while another only lowers his eyes. Later, two teenagers smile from the damaged images, kept at a distance on film and rigorously separated in the montage. A motorized journey begins, a maelstrom is created. The mysterious story behind these scenes remains elusive and can only be guessed at, a repressed shocker shoved deep into the unconscious. Near the end the visual metastases intensify, the film’s surface flashes and throbs. Heavy Eyes, in line with its title, outlines a fiction of filmic vision involving a lethargy of the eyes which creates both the illusion of movement and an unsettling multiplication of external events. An image of eyeglasses that have been stepped on and crushed ends the film: The old manner of seeing no longer applies.
(Stefan Grissemann)
Schwere Augen
2011
Austria
10 min