Holiday Film
Holiday Film juggles intimacy and distance with a gradual removal of the object on display. Seen from a distance, a woman strolls in a meadow; up close she appears narcissistically absorbed (...) Time and again a partly unbuttoned blouse reveals her breast, shot with a powerful telephoto lens. But the idyll is radically undermined when the woman suddenly looks directly into the camera. The film cuts instantaneously – the voyeur is discovered! ¬ This chain of events continually jumps back to the beginning and is repeated, but each time as a refilmed version of the preceding sequence. The resulting generational loss leads to perfect illegibility, till all that remains is abstract, flickering imagery. Erotic spectacle increasingly becomes a matter of memory. (Michael Palm)