No Return No Return

The white, gray and black rooms of a common past and the separate present, the surrounding dreams and fantasies about one‘s own life and the lives of others: when Olga, Yvonne and Manon - three former best friends meet again after twenty years, the facades of their life contracts are removed layer by layer. But they separate again before the résumés collapse.

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Antoinette Zwirchmayr’s dreamlike Venus Delta offers a precisely composed and somewhat eerie miniature of jagged rock formations, a crystalline water stream, and the form of a woman suggested by smooth skin and a voluminous, crimped mane.

Is it possible to question images, and if so, what would they answer? Antoinette Zwirchmayr’s Fragebogen pursues this question in a cine­matic gaze at an older white man.

In my memory, Brazil is a film with few images and long stretches of darkness. While the screen remains black, my fears and longings are projected onto it, combining the images and attempting to give them meaning. Brazil has wormed its way into my imagination in a form the country has never assumed in real life.

A dully dyed cloth in the woods, stretched as a connective texture between the trees. The contours of two naked, pregnant bodies that come into contact with just that materiality — first in the midst of the empty black space, then in the nature surrounding them — leaning on the tree, rubbing together palms of hands and bodies. A tapestry of piano keys and vocals appends itself as an expression of this phase of life in the in-between.

Lit like the central figure on a stage the body, seen here as a quiet monument, fills out the frame. Small puffy clouds of steam hover across it.

Together with a friend, 17-year old Josef robs a bank and gets caught. A few weeks later he is released from prison and returns to his home village. Faced with the difficulty of having to deal with the villagers' open contempt, he runs away to Brazil.

A place essentially bound up with dismal memories and the smell of old leather and sweat becomes a stage for enraptured performances. The setting and habitat of At the Edge of the Curtain is a gymnasium. Its occupants: three women whose relationships and states of desire are as multiple and ambivalent as their selves are amorphous and fragmented. Subjectivities circulate, but their bodies persist in stasis.

With What I Remember, filmmaker Antoinette Zwirchmayr revisits her family’s history and her own memories to create a 35 mm visual and aural jigsaw in three mysterious sensorial chapters.

Antoinette Zwirchmayr's serenely composed images create a calm, surrealistic atmosphere of transformation. As if time were suspended, her still lives linger with lucid clarity in a state between dream and consciousness. A male body, seen through the filmmaker's lens, reveals abstract, sculpted forms reminiscent of classical statues. Breathing softly, the dreamer is alive. The quail eggs resting atop his upper legs conjure up thoughts of birth and rebirth (through sleep). While the images seem to be corresponding silently with one another in a dreamlike logic, the film projector hums, shedding light on interior and exterior and back again.

A translation into film of a play by Lea Doher. Men and women in constant movement share the words. What are the powers of art in today’s world?

Seemingly stranded and enthralled like a somnambulist: a female figure amid a rocky, dried-up riverbed. Motionless, exposed, and yet turned inward. Now entwined in the branches of the sparse vegetation, now lying on the delicate fissures of the parched ground, from these convergences and from the interplay of images arises a sort of approximation, or analogy.

The contemplative serenity Antoinette Zwirchmayr creates in House and Universe is offset by notions of restlessness and unease, that the images of a dormant, naked young woman – alter- natingly shown in a sparse, bright motel room and the blooming desert landscape outside – provide. Shown only in fragments, the sleeper seems blissfully unconnected to her surroundings. Tinged in warm sunlight, yet subtly charged with associations of isolation and vulnerability, the film presents a dreamlike, almost hallucinogenic portrayal of a person in a state of transcendence.

'The Seismic Form' is based on a text by Jean Baudrillard, edited down to a few sentences in line with Zwirchmayr's elliptical and suggestive aesthetics, and read out in three different languages with selective subtitles. The French theoretician combines the interest in the phenomena of nature with a cultural narrative and a critique of civilisation.

Shiny organic surfaces lead into a stream of movements and elements, a passage of time in which all earthly order appears to be dissolved. In shimmering orange costumes, three figures wander through a secret cave world. Their ritualized movements not only build up an occult tension but also conjure up something absent but possibly soon approaching in gestures of union.