Odessa Crash Test (Notes on Film 09)

Sometime, hopefully not too soon, in a place wherever but not here, all life will have moved underground after a failed uprising. Everybody wears a mask, more often than not of the variety seen only at Halloween these days. In this scary universe (that on closer inspection looks like a twisted, perverted version of our here and now...), a man with a gorilla mask is searching for a little boy with a hessian hood. His quest leads him into a maze of depravity, a pandemonium of all our nightmares and darkest desires – where something awaits that he had already given up on: love.

There are no taboos in the grotesque underground realm of Pfaffenbichler’s 2551 movies, which cross all borders, especially those of good taste. Reviving the original punk spirit of true independent filmmaking, Pfaffenbichler and his ingenious collaborators have concocted another marvel of no-budget ingenuity.

A man rescues a boy and later tries to get him off his back but to little avail, so they end up drifting around a subterranean world, populated by grotesque masked figures. A hundred years after Chaplin filmed his first feature film, The Kid, Norbert Pfaffenbichler offers an experimental punk-style interpretation, which the filmmaker himself has defined as a dystopian slapstick film.

In this grotesque found-footage-film, close-ups of actors playing Adolf Hitler in movies created between 1940 and today are combined in shot/countershot style.

ADGIN PRRX is an anagram of Grand Prix, the title of John Frankenheimer's monumental car racing film, which Norbert Pfaffenbichler has remounted here into a strictly metrical and deeply personal meditation on the nature of time, the thrill of speed, and the melancholy of creeping deceleration, standstill, and death.

Thanks to his myriad film roles, Lon Chaney is known as “the man of a thousand faces,” and you could say that the early horror era never beheld a figure more intriguing. Yet because of his numerous transformations, his face never became as iconic as that of, say, Boris Karloff. Accompanied by a soundtrack from Bernhard Lang, this “re-imagination of shots” taken from Chaney´s forty-six surviving films offers a beguiling excursion into the history of film. The director reveals surprising associations, while highlighting the enduring magic of works which are now more or less forgotten.