Blah Blah Blah

An essay on restlessness: Blah Blah Blah (based on a song by Iggy Pop: Dietmar Brehm never really liked it, but likes it for that very reason) contains a large number of various kinds of shots in a montage which alternates between contemplative scenes and rapid cascades of images. Brehm uses sounds of rain and thunder, with which he is quite familiar, on the soundtrack. In addition a beat measures the rhythm, and its regularity is what makes the Blah Blah Blah project measurable. Dietmar Brehm has devoted himself to filming his own footage at a higher speed. He uses images typical of a still life (whisky bottles, ashtrays, etc.) and refracts them ironically (a chair stands on two legs), combines them with footage used in earlier works, and arranges them in a row like fragmentary thoughts. The result is a consciousness film par excellence. In Blah Blah Blah Brehm examines his own film oeuvre, not for the purpose of seeing what he has achieved, but in the interests of casually increasing its intensity. Instead of intruding into the images, he merely touches upon them lightly this time. All hope for calm, such as with a shot of a statue in a park, is disappointed because, in Blah Blah Blah, Brehm has applied the principle of the mental foray to his own film, which he shoots with his camera, speeds up, turns around, and makes absorb itself: Blah Blah Blah becomes Blah Blah Blah. Only those viewers who share the restlessness will recognize the inversion.

(Bert Rebhandl)


Blah Blah Blah begins with whisky, gin and rum bottles, which are followed by a visual cascade of scenes, some taken from the Naturalistic Films 2004 series and 6 Found Footage Film Miniatures 2004, plus a Godzilla sequence and fragments from Climax. To take things in Blah Blah Blah one step further, I filmed Blah Blah Blah from end to beginning and begin- ning to end, again at 2 frames/sec., for the final scene. Blah Blah Blah turned out much better than I intended.

(Dietmar Brehm)