Zlaté Piesky Rocket Launch

Breaking the large and symmetrical with the small and singular; and vice versa—a principle continually applied in Josef Dabernig’s art. Here, too, in the film Zlaté Piesky Rocket Launch, which as a whole, can be interpreted as an allegory of the world’s (impossible to end) bipolarity. Large and small are embodied at first by parents (played by Dabernig’s son and daughter) and two small boys (one of them, Dabernig’s grandson), who check into a seemingly abandoned, somewhat run-down park hotel named Flóra (“played” by the eponymous complex in Bratislava’s Zlaté Piesky recreational area). Entirely true to his film’s wink-of-an-eye principle of family, Dabernig himself is there behind the reception desk and lets himself show, with exaggerated gestures, that he is shocked by the children’s gentle war games. But in the parallel montages that follow, the war, furthermore, the “cold” war or what is left of it as reminisces, takes on extremely unexpected features. While the adults switch on their laptops without exchanging a word in the sparse hotel room, and prepare for a simulated rocket start, the boys run around aimlessly in the expansive park grounds. Dressed as astronauts (or, rather, cosmonauts), they play with homemade rockets and flying objects. While this is going on, the camera’s gaze continuously turns searchingly skyward. Added to that are the sounds, likewise set parallel, of two earthy pieces by the Kattowitz hip hop group Kaliber 44: one assigned to the adults, one the kids. Only once does a camera pan combine inside and outside spaces, and while the analogue children’s game ends outdoors under a huge rocket-like pipe, the adults become lost in the digital orbit of their outer-space mission (playing out on the screen). Meanwhile, the electronic sci-fi sounds continue to bleep spiritedly. The refraction of two spheres falling into one another, yet somehow linked: charged to the full.
(Christian Höller)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt