Bomb!

Bomb! is a film for impatient people, though impatient people with a good memory. For impatient people because its plot, which does not quite fill four minutes, would be sufficient for ninety; for impatient people with a good memory because the reduction to essential elements – the bomb ticking away in the suitcase, the suitcase loaded into the airplane – requires knowledge of the non-essential elements which are dispensed with, and as a result of this exclusion are firmly embedded. The missing pieces are revealed to be decorative, basically superfluous embellishments which hinder the viewer´s concentration on that extremely simple mechanism used to create the tension cinema – as the entertaining art of moving images – is based on.

There is an order and an element within this order which represents a potential threat to it. This constellation is sufficient to create the kind of tension common to moving images, more properly called suspense, which is enjoyable because it introduces a specific gradient of knowledge: The viewer is aware of the present possibility of a future catastrophe, but is not sure it will in fact happen. The product of this constellation is a currency ratio according to which every action or event in the present, regardless of how banal, takes on extreme significance. Bomb! demonstrates that this significance of the present moment also infects more or less machine-like processes, recalling in this way the fact that the art of the moving image – regardless of any anthropocentric superstrata – is thoroughly mechanical. (Vrääth Öhner)

Translation: Steve Wilder