Pascal Fendrich / Bernd Härpfer

In the background an overcast skyline on the shore. A pan shot to the left slowly starts and then accelerates continuously. Soon the panorama turns out to be a stripe of identical image sections mirrored over and over again.

Meanwhile a huge oil tanker enters the scene from the right. However, it doesn't get mirrored at the axes of reflexion, but floats on forward not influenced at all by its unreal surrounding, until the accelerating camera movement does not catch up with it any more. While the skyline passes by with still rising speed, the ship suddenly appears on opposite course from the left as a mirrored image of itself.

The tanker remains as a verisimilar object for the spectator, while the view as a whole is transformed. This actually gets possible by a much more fundamental intervention in the footage: a spatio-temporal restructuring related to the slit scan technique, which additionally introduces a precise analysis of the initial movement in the footage, and which aims at keeping up the overall spatial continuity of the scenario.

From this image transformation subtly composed along the edge of perception emerges an aesthetic suspense, even increased by the soundtrack. The music evolves from the analysis of the original recording, which, akin to the visual narration, is first subliminally and later more and more obviously transformed. Ambient noise is orchestrated and formed to flexible elements of a multilayered sound composition, which oscillates between iridescent complexity and clear harmony.

Undisturbed by the known laws of physics, the ship continues traveling to nameless regions ahead.

Crude Carrier

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