When the finger points at the moon
...the fool looks at the finger" (proverb).
(2008, HDV, Color, 38 Min.)
With: Lena Taege, Katja Keya Richter, Christian Mock, Kathrin Osterode, Agnieszka Dmochowska, Nora Hütz.
An actress is caught in an archetypal world, governed by the compulsive, didactic mechanisms of the Hero’s Journey, of filmic conventions, of story-telling and acting rituals. Is happiness a longing for repetition?
Without giving the answer or merely being parodistic, the work scrutinizes heroes, dominant narratives and their exposed structures. The mechanics of story telling and acting take over and generate the plot, which seems to be about our desire for and pleasure in repetition, how cinema affects us and what it teaches us (hero stories being didactic).
The choreographic aspect of stunts and their relationship with dance are foregrounded, looking at cinema’s relationship to the human body and with violence as a means of provoking the identification of the viewer.
Through its distanced, minimalist aesthetic and acting, the film becomes a reflexion on unavoidabilities in storytelling, and how it and cinema carry their messages.