close your eyes

In Billy Roisz’s close your eyes knocking and rhythmically vibrating sounds take us from a black picture into a darkened room, its shades pulled down. At the film’s beginning a positive and negative image of a window that references this space reveals its function as a projection screen in hypnotic, almost psychedelic audiovisual compositions. Roisz skillfully takes us further, from this real space in the beginning sequence to abstract black-and-white images composed of fine lines that move in time with the fragile soundtrack, turn into dotted lines, then immediately puncture this linearity. High-frequency sounds and scratching noises by the musician dieb13 and arrangements of images that dazzlingly flare up cover these vertical lines to an ever greater extent. At first, a shadowy detail of the window leads back, again and again, from the fast pace of abstract images to that of the private space for brief moments. Accompanied by shrill high-pitched sounds, distorted brass instruments and gentle psychedelic noises, the viewer is lead into hypnotically colorful graphic compositions. Occasionally recognizable in a trance-like flurry of images, at second glance an image of a herd of hippopotamuses or grazing giraffes, tinted pink, reveals itself for a few seconds at a time. Vibrating yellowish-gray stripes flow into a black-and-white striped pattern, calling a herd of zebras to mind. Black frames punctuated in staccato fashion then show the window, heralding the end of the delirious dance: the return to the “real space.” Billy Roisz, inspired by the hallucinogenic experiences of painter, writer and poet Henri Michaux, has undertaken a fascinating trip into the abstract and absurd and to the limits of our perceptive ability.
(Christa Auderlitzky)
Translation: Steve Wilder

Orig. Title
close your eyes
Year
2009
Country
Austria
Duration
13 min
Director
Billy Roisz
Category
Experimental
Orig. Language
No Dialogue
Downloads
Credits
Director
Billy Roisz
Music
dieb13
Available Formats
Digital File (prores, h264)
Festivals (Selection)
2010
Wien - Tricky Women / Animationsfilmfestival
Rotterdam - Int. Filmfestival
Graz - Diagonale, Festival des österreichischen Films
Edinburgh - International Film Festival
2011
Nashville Film Festival