FAREWELL TO HELL

How did we get in here? All at once (in a flash pan), we´re asked in with an inviting gesture. Into an empty sun-bathed room haunted by ghostly voices. The picture trembles, the voices jump slightly. A naked body with a reddish tinge breathes, folds and unfolds, filling the picture. A spotty, greenish-black pattern resembles a boil. In a gloomy hallway we peep around a corner — into a space that doesn´t offer a way out. And who has the last laugh now?
In 1999 the film, language and performance artist Sabine Marte made a video expressing the intention I Would Like to Make a Horror Movie Sometime. Her latest work also makes references to this classic genre: In its title, images, harsh sounds and voiceover narration, FAREWELL TO HELL plays with suggestions of characteristic motifs. Possibly a haunted house. An unidentifiable body in which there seems to be some activity. The woman who was there twice. "She knows very well how to act in a horror film."
This doesn´t produce a self-contained narrative, as the film also makes use of those characteristic features of a horror film involving narrowing of the field of view, instability and ambiguousness of the images, and the possibility of charging and reinterpreting them. A few visual motifs recur several times, gradually develop a dynamism and dramatically intrude upon one another, and they´re literally ascribed an interpretation. But because language too can involve ambivalence, one question remains open until the end: "Did something just happen or not?"
(Isabella Reicher)

Translation: Steve Wilder