Barbara Meter

A wordless experimental collage of impressions and moods. Grainy fragments of landscapes, flakes whirl in the wind. Fog and mist, shadows of people in the city and by the water… Silhouettes that fade and turn into pure light and shadow until we discern the specks and scratches on the film strip itself. Sometimes, for a fraction of a second, a face, a person. A film as a memory that eludes us.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

A day in the life of an old Ottoman bath with the bath itself as the main character -- from dawn till dusk, where the light, the mirroring in the water and the visitors figure alongside the protagonist .

The constant movement of the wheels, threads, sprockets, feet and hands suggests restlessness, and this is paralleled by the soundtrack. The unknown woman could be Gretchen from Faust, hopelessly in love or Ariadne who gave Theseus the thread to find his way out of labyrinth or perhaps she is one of the fates, weaving destiny… Enlarged from Super-8 to 35mm, the film is very grainy, in itself an homage to the medium of film which is also emphasized by the depiction of all kinds of turning machines, both in image and sound.

Short film by Barbara Meter.

Often the images are held for awhile and then left to themselves - only to fade out just as they begin to move. For me this enhances the feeling of memory - and the sensation that when you leave a place you know that everything is still there, without you. And so the film is both elongated and fragmented.

They can be seen in the whole of Greece: the small and humble buildings along the roadside dedicated to a saint. Often a burning candle illuminates the colourful interior. Most of them are erected to the memory of a beloved, killed in a car accident, others because someone has been miraculously saved. They are the evidence of a daily devotion and are called 'proskynitaria' or 'ikonismata'. The older ones many have been built becuase somebody had a significant dream on the spot, or to indicate the place of a former church or perhaps to protect the entrance of a house against ill luck. Each 'proskynitari' has its own story. This documentary tells us some of these stories and shows an importnat aspect of how the Greek people deal with death and what role religion plays in everyday life.

In her recent film Up to the Sky and Much Much More, Meter uses letters sent to her by her father during World War II to provide the film's narration, while interviews with her mother expand on his opposition to fascism — as well as to constraints of any kind, including the bonds of family — and his eventual conscription to the Eastern front. Remarkably, her father's epistolary accounts of his daily life as a soldier also include fantastical watercolour illustrations of his travels, which Meter incorporates to movingly amplify the emotional resonance of a father-daughter bond made fraught by distance and war.