WARTEZEIT // WAITING TIME скачать в хорошем качестве

WARTEZEIT // WAITING TIME

“Waiting Time” shows a protagonist stuck in non-places. The POV-Film allows us to follow at almost unbearable length how a Berlin resident waits for his connecting train in Berlin Ringbahn. As viewers, we encounter familiar motifs here: advertising posters, snack machines, rubbish bins, waste separation, pigeons, graffiti, seating arrangements, ticket machines and infoscreens – all signs of public transport. However, the deeper we dive into the waiting process (if one can speak of a process at all), the more exchangeable what is shown becomes. We notice: “Waiting Time” shows not only non-places, but also non-events, which are precisely why they are so symptomatic of transitory spaces. The images of the film stimulate our memories, not because we associate them with Berlin, but because these signifiers of public transport exist everywhere in the world, detached from spatial territorialization. To counteract the alienation and dis-orientiation, we see exhibited historical photo series and architectural monuments designed by urban cityplanners. Ghosts of the past that help us to read the present. No matter how hard we try, while watching Waiting Time, it is impossible to entirely make sense of the information we process. This is reinforced by the split screen situation, that leaves viewers overwhelmed by the infinite information stream of nothingness. What we are left with is a strange feeling of unreality, that is exemplary for postmodern architecture. The railway tracks form architectural canyons that wind through the city like motorways crossing mountains. Sometimes, if we are lucky, the platform of the railway allows us to look down on the city. But then again, we are not really there. When the focus of the camera catches temporary protagonists in the distance, we observe their fragmentary movements isolated from any historicity – their abstract actions reminding us of NPC’s from Grand Theft Auto. This disturbing sense of unreality fills us with strangeness and discomfort until (sooner or later) the train finally arrives and the protagonist gets on. Only in this very moment we return to reality. With the onset of the next sequence, however, the scenery starts all over again, like a simulacrum. Thereby leaving the viewers, like the protagonist, caught in an endless loop of residence in places that were designed to be left. a film by jan-willem marquardt and janosch ahlers udk berlin prof. timothee ingen-housz