besenbahn (2001, remastered 2020)

“the freewaysystem in its totality is now a single comprehensible place, a coherent state of mind, a complete way of life” – Reyner Banham

“Traversing homogenous suburbs and multiplexed freeways, Besenbahn clinically and elegantly fragments the notion of a ‘road movie’. Using time slice technology, this videographic experiment transcends time and place as it ruptures the geometries of movement and perception.” — Melbourne Film Festival

“It´s subject is not ”natural” perception, but perception put in motion by modern means of transportation, and therefore implicitly the history of an epochal transformation of the way in which time and space is experienced. It has come to a preliminary end in suitable contexts – for example cities such as Los Angeles, which has been shaped by the history of motorization – where moving perception now seems to be regarded as integral to natural perception. The thesis presented by besenbahn in this regard would therefore be that the specifically aesthetic quality of such animated perception is absent from the forms of audiovisual representation which are already considered natural (such as indicating movement by means of a tracking shot): In its fragmentation of the continuum of perception, the “subjective geometry which defines space through intervals of time” (Dietmar Offenhuber) illustrates a manner of experience which could remain submerged because it is already so familiar” – Vrääth Öhner

2001, 10 min
video: Dietmar Offenhuber, music: tamtam (Sam Auinger, Hannes Strobl)
more information on www.stadtmusik.org

Besenbahn is distributed by Sixpackfilm and included in the INDEX and VISIONary anthologies