. ..... .:.:...:::ccccoCCoooo:: 's narrative is but splinters. Roughly a demi-century ago it was radical to solely narrate a storys essentials - if somebody went from here to there, he said so in one image and in the next he'd already reached his destination, regardless of how. Yet, once one starts to pare things down like that, ever more things become superfluous, even useless - till one reaches a point like Pointeker's where a few choice images of streets and buildings interspersed with the occasional human presence tell a plethora of stories in a style best named hardcore modernist. The car in the beginning, it's beam slicing up the dark, evokes the whole iconography of film noir, each image - lots of night views - seems to cement this reading, till in the end not a story in a certain genre was told but the genre itself given shape and presence, therewith a whole culture: cinema. Final coup (de grace?): The last image seems set to synch sound - feels like total realism, full frontal verite, and everything we saw till now is true - only, where's the person whose steps are heard? What remains is the presence of all things, their beauty, of colours burning brightly. By the way: Read along a different iconography,
. ..... .:.:...:::ccccoCCoooo:: might as well tell a love story.
taken from: Olaf Möller: Which Spate of Time Is Longer: That Before Birth or That After Death?, in: CINEPLEX. Experimentalfilme aus Österreich, exhibition catalogue Secession Vienna 2009
In the terminology of film, "ellipsis" refers to something that has been left out: what happens between scenes, what the audience never gets to see and has to infer by "putting two and two together."
. ..... .:.:...:::ccccoCCoooo:: by Ben Pointeker applies ellipsis as a narrative strategy in an extremely thorough fashion. The work almost suggests that what we see is a chronological sequence of scenes removed during the "final cut" of a feature film - perhaps a crime thriller. We watch precisely arranged tableaus, most of them showing urban "non-places" such as deserted streets, squares, and railway stations at night. Now and then an elegantly dressed female figure can be seen crossing the picture in the background. Yet Pointeker takes his principled refusal even further: not only are the sequences cut to conceal more than they reveal; the picture itself contains little the audience could draw on for orientation. Most takes are shrouded in pitch darkness, with only parts of the picture illuminated. This uncanny filmic miniature forces the viewer to come to his or her own conclusions as to what is going on; at the same time, it of course evokes memories of countless genre flicks. Sound, too, is used most sparingly and to the greatest effect. In a film that is for the most part mute, the short acoustic fragments that can be heard now and then only make the subsequent silence seem more intense. Pointeker has banished any sort of concrete textuality from his works; the film does not even have opening or closing credits. The title is a visual reproduction using letters of the film's first shot, its "title sequence": a scene in which the perfectly black surface of the image is breached by a pair of tiny car headlights, shot from a bird's eye view, crossing the frame from right to left.
Norbert Pfaffenbichler in: CINEPLEX. Experimentalfilme aus Österreich, exhibition catalogue Secession Vienna 2009