Revolving Rounds
Johann Lurf 2024 © w. Christina Jauernik courtesy sixpackfilm
Johann Lurf 2024 © w. Christina Jauernik courtesy sixpackfilm
Johann Lurf 2024 © w. Christina Jauernik courtesy sixpackfilm
Befitting its title, Revolving Rounds is a cyclical film in both form and content. Shot at an agricultural field on the outskirts of Vienna, Johann Lurf and Christina Jauernik’s 3D short begins as it ends, tracking a planimetric path alongside three greenhouses as the early morning sun beams across the surrounding landscape. Approaching the structures via a series of jump cuts (each registering a slight change in light and accented by an eventual switch from 35mm to 16mm film), the two synchronized cameras settle in front of the structure to the far right, before moving inside where a pair of 16mm projectors and a cyclostéréoscope sit in the distance.
A midcentury cinematic device that uses a rotating barrier-grid to display autostereoscopic 3D without the need for glasses, the cyclostéréoscope today resembles a piece of industrial farm equipment as much as a premodern line screen apparatus—a correlation that Lurf and Jauernik tease out through a spatiotemporal intervention with both the instrument itself and the subject being animated in its spinning frame: a pea plant. Across a pair of abrupt cuts—this time from dusk to twilight and from twilight to total darkness—the projectors suddenly whir to life as footage of the plant is cast on the cyclostéréoscope. Soon, Lurf and Jauernik’s encroaching cameras breach the threshold of the projected image, pushing past the point of legibility and into a purely granular yet volumetric space where the essence of the natural world meets the chemical composition of the film strip. As the frame pulls back, we find ourselves where we began: in the light of day, charting a course through space, time, and perception. A field trip in every sense. (Jordan Cronk)
Revolving Rounds
2024
Austria
11 min