Me and Ma and Everything and Nothing

Night, a full moon shown in long shot. In the film’s single motionless take, when the slow procession of clouds opens up the view of the moon and then blocks it again, a viewer trained in film history might expect her own eye to be cut – the image that Luis Buñuel in Un chien andalou presented as a graphic equivalent of the spectacle of Nature. In Sasha Pirker’s work, however, unlike Buñuel’s surrealistic attack on the eye, there is no cut and no shock – instead she evokes the multifarious mythology of the moon even as it holds her spellbound. Surrendering oneself to lunar influence without becoming lunatic is perhaps how the poetic program of the film could be described. In three parts, a meditation on the process of artistic creation unfolds in the gravitational center of the moon, modulating from language to voice to music. In the long voiceover of Part 1, the filmmaker’s “Me” emerges as a filmic subjectivity that reflects on possible, planned and future works in the face of the moon, leaving the question aside as to whether the long shot of the moon is now part of this upcoming film or just a source of creative inspiration. In Part 2, an intertitle announces the tentative failure of this film project, but this negation of the announced film (whose title, “Ma”, refers to the Japanese concept of negative, empty space) simultaneously positivizes itself as the same film of the moon that we are still gazing at with fascination. But something has happened to the voice: due to a cold, its tonality has become harsher, so that we hear the “grain of the voice” (Roland Barthes) in its rough physicality. In the associative logic of alliteration, after “Me” and “Ma” comes the literal “Moon” in the audio form of a rousing music track, whose dynamics build up extreme tension against the stasis of the image. Now the unfinished film is perhaps finished after all – as a liberated dance under the moon. (Sulgi Lie)

Translation: John Wojtowicz