Peng-Peng

Signal tones and images woven into a rebus-like montage crime story: That´s how one could outline the blueprint of Peng-Peng, which combines well-known material from Brehm´s archive and embeds it in a framework narrativ.
At first there is the grumpy tone of an old analog dial telephone, a ringing which fails to find the intended party. This is accompanied by a shot of a gloomy, overcast piece of forest (one of the few sequences Brehm made himself). As a kind of signal the scene announces that good things can hardly be expected to follow, to say nothing of a story which turns out in the end.
And then the first episode, with a profile of a man´s face. At the beginning it speaks into nothingness and finally, when repeated, is complemented by a woman walking out of the picture. This montage, shot through with the "pump effect" typical of Brehm´s work, seems to release emotional values of the individual motifs isolated within it. Emblems of watching, even emotionally laden staring and a supplementary but never congruent being watched.
This is the same in the second scene: Faces from footage Brehm used frequently in earlier films - like characters from pop mythology, he calls them "Hey Joe" and "Oh! Jim"- seem at first to form a shot-countershot loop. But then, accompanied by signallike barking of a dog, rolling thunder and ringing of bells, a third element enters and destroys the self-contained sequence of images. Meat, a spoon, and then the images, always voyeuristically coded, of a masturbating man, a kiss,
an operation incision, and finally penetration - all that is interwoven like a pictogram to create a mystery montage, which in the end lets the "Oh! Jim" face fade in a designated blur.
In the final scene, of a green, sundrenched stand of trees, a solution (or salvation) is suggested. Solely its dual nature preserves the impenetrability of Peng-Peng to the very end.

(Christian Höller)

Translation: Steve Wilder


Intriguing montage of found-footage from diverging sources. Amateur nature shots frame several fragments from porn films. The new ordering makes the once so simple material - porn and amateurism share their simplicity - complex and in a certain sense hermetic. The flatness becomes peotic.

(Festival Catalog of the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2007)