Bildname
subtile / subtitled     

film subtitles normally stay in a running frame for about 4 to 6 seconds, or within
a rapid sequence of frames for the shortest calculable time for curtailed reading,
nothing for abiding viewers, or else the short sentence remains visible in the
frame for too long, so that the viewer becomes restless because the text to be
read is not moving on, whereas the voices of the actors have already hurried on
ahead and the protagonists have perhaps embarked on an extensive discourse
which, due to all the looking back and forth between image and text and to a de-
ficient knowledge of the language, has not been understood and in essence
practically missed, so that it is a matter of interpolating and supplementing from
the context, of making sense of the significance of the dialogue and the strands
of action oneself, of thinking forwards and backwards, drawing conclusions
about what might have been meant from the respective gestures and physio-
gnomies, possibly in a state of increasing irritation because the perceptual work
overgrows everything else and after a while one is already lagging irrecoverably
behind, just as in real life.

EMIL SUSANNE JOSEF is written in embossed letters all in the same colour on the
door of a domicile in the Favoriten district of Vienna, in a little-known street called
Senefelderstrasse, which one would have attributed to Berlin (East) as the conti-
nuation of the Kollwitzstrasse on Prenzlauer Berg, but then perhaps we look it up:
Alois Senefelder (1771-1834), the inventor of lithography (lithographic printing),
and already the associative  machinery moves on to the most multitudinous repro-
duction techniques, even if that might be a computer print-out in an obscuring and
coarsely screened fax mode, and straightaway further blurring and mistakes begin
to creep in: one has a picture placed before one which shows a room in the Raiff-
eisenZentrale on Viennas Danube Canal, perhaps the Counsel Generals office,
and one hears the words BULGARO ROSSO and HUSSY CLEVER, thus misunder-
standing Russian leather, and then looks at a confusing polaroid series entitled
TANGO SLEEP and believes that one has here not mis-read, but mis-taken at least
the apparent definition of the gender depicted or to be surmised: male or female or
even a third one, oh yes everything always becomes frayed and who really knows
exactly what the parent of TELEKABEL is called and whether UPC really is the name
of the younger offshoot, DAVID BARBARA BATHTUB, might be found on the door of
another room in another time in another city or at least another district of the city, but
then we are already listening to the joyfully communicative real child, how it brings
its rudimentary subtitles into the adult world, namely EMIL WORKING, EMIL UNDER-
PANTS, EMIL LEGO, EMIL RASCAL, yet what could this LOUNGER FOR A LADY
AND HER TWO LOVERS be called, namely just so or shorter, and a CAUSEUSE for
a causeur from the historical Section N would probably also be included, although
the question immediately arises: which CAUSA CELEBRIS would be dealt with in it,
certainly that of the original and plagiarism, or perhaps even that of the Creation and
its tacit misappropriation, while a TABLE WITH CONICAL LEGS stands there very real
in the conference room of the Institute for the Science of the Human Being watching
its pentagonal form being repeated rod-shaped in a lighting fixture hanging from the
ceiling, oh well: due to excessive use, only the rudiments still exist of the MAX STIR-
NER wardrobe from the anarchist series ICONS, with its quiver, arrows and banners,
an anarchist restoration probably being out of the question if only on account of the
literal meaning.

it is a bit easier with the series of heads that goes under the title CROWNINGS, and
here even the children can join in again without any further ado, even if all the head-
pieces are manufactured from the same grey material, namely the chiefs sparsely
feathered crown, a miners helmet or a shepherds cap, the court fools two-flapped
tassled headpiece or the dancing Dervishs towering cone, which may also be trun-
cated on top, and the fact that the series is brought to an end with a criminal in a
blindfold, that might for a start be confusing, if the unsuspicious blind mans buff didnt
jump in as a harmless appreciation variation, at the title FILM NOIR perhaps we first
think of the special genre of the thriller and then see so and so many heat-sealed
26x26 polaroid enlargements of a variety of pictorial subjects, how many does it have
to be and how few unclear photographs may it be before we recognise the subliminal
subject, although straightaway certain individual SNAPSHOTS (in the actual sense of
the word) once again burn their way into our pictorial memory, starting from today we
will recognise them immediately, or does such an enigmatic scene perhaps indicate
that we are preoccupied with recognising prenatal or reincarnatal perceptions more
often than we think, FLIGHTSAND could be the name of a reconstruction of the urban
world of children and adolescents from the year dot, something which of course
everyone can boast in his or her own way and indeed carries around with them, from
way back when the streets of Meidling-Wilhelmsdorf were not yet full of traffic and
blocked by cars, from the nest, from the treasure house, from a childhood in this case
Catholic, from the structural architectural elements of the deepest district of childhood
which are today missing or have been spoilt, it would seem that we have only this one
single biography after all and for the whole of the rest of our lives we are preoccupied
with regaining a certain formative and in retrospect even happy phase of our childhood,
those inconspicuous places, those forest paths of times gone by, strewn with beech-
nuts and covered with haircap moss, which we would love to revisit, recreate, reach
and smell once more.

even if someone deliberately pushes all the anonymous ways of recording a moment
of life, e.g. is glad to have forgotten to focus the lens or glad that the camera, thrown
into the air, was triggered before being caught again, even if someone can be glad
about every reflection in the compartment window, catapulted into the more or less
well-kept railway landscape, for example on a trip through the Weinviertel or through
autumnal Italy, he nevertheless still cannot avoid saying something about what was
coincidentally captured, and for a short time there was even the possibility of speaking
what was said onto a magnetic strip on the back of the photograph, so that someone
else nearby or faraway could play it on the appropriate equipment and listen, the spoken
mini-legend naturally limited to the duration of the strip: Klaus would like it, Susanne
wouldnt like it one might be able to hear on some of those recordings today, if there
were a necessity of making a choice, the equipment for speaking and listening has not
established itself, although the magnetic strip has: now silent, it has moved on to tele-
phone cards and credit cards.

so on one side of the swing sits the almost anonymous photograph, on the opposite
side the staged photograph: and then two naked youthful wrestlers, both of them
sturdy lads and whats more cousins (the persons and their names are familiar),
could be placed on a checkered floor to fight each other, at first as if in jest, later no
longer quite so harmlessly, while the stage-setter stands on a table above the two
bodies and takes his black-and-white photos apparently uninvolved, as if what were
important to him were solely the fascinating play of the shapes of arms, legs and
bodies in this sweaty friendly game.

there are manifold and multifarious occasions for our art of remembering, yet they
are always also striving towards an art of formulation: just as the amateur photo-
grapher used to spend a quiet hour providing his holiday and family snapshots with
captions in undisguised onomatology and toponomatology, in accordance with a
standard sentence: the so and sos were there and there, these are the twins at first
communion, thats Friederike in Malmö, thats me on Vesuvius, so the artist, insofar
as he wants to satisfy himself about himself and his environment photographically,
and even if he does use the most cunning strategies of avoidance, of automatism
and of optical exorcism, is also seeking that redeeming sentence which evokes many
other sentences, collecting them into a kaleidoscope of life history or even into the
declared lack of a biography, whether this first phrase is then uttered and written
down before the picture or not.

Bodo Hell   2003

Bodo Hell
Born 1943 in Salzburg, lives in Vienna and on Dachstein, prose, radiophonic work,
theatre, texts in public spaces, photography, film, music, alpine farming, Prize of
Literary Centres 2003, recently published: Tracht: Pflicht, texts for reading and
speaking (Verlag Droschl 2003). Actor in the film Im Anfang war das Wort by Bady
Minck (amour fou 2003)