Machines

In the warm light of a glowing filament the moving machine parts resemble spools, wires and gearwheels. A turntable with a numerical scale spins slowly and shows various readings, though their significance is never revealed. Details, parts of which are out of focus, appear on a black background, and in them the filmmaker and graphic artist Jeremias Altmann shows fragments of four machines he constructed of discarded household appliances. After initial silence the metallic clattering and roar of the mechanism gets louder. Rows of illegible numbers are hammered onto a roll of paper. Views of a dead moth complete...