Adnan Softic
Luk - Onion - Zwiebel
Artist | Adnan Softic |
Year | 2007 |
Duration | 21:49 min |
Technical info | Film S 16mm & Video |
Contact | |
About the video
A cleaner observes his associates without ever actually meeting them. His son fears a burglar who doesn't exist. Their common friend meets a reincarnation of Janis Joplin whom he tries to convince to return to the netherworld in a reasonable manner.
This movie by Adnan Softić circles around questions regarding the perception of reality, hallucinations and projections of ideals. Already during the front credits of sorts the unstable relationship of unfiltered perception of reality, necessary protection against stimuli, and streams of association is addressed. As an episodic movie it is subdivided into three loosely intertwined narrative strands. One of them follows a pupil who is mostly encountered alone at home playing computer games and permanently feeling threatened by burglars; the second one shows a young man who likes to cook, conversing with his girlfriend and facing a further woman, whom he addresses as Janis Joplin; eventually he portrays an adult man, who earns his money as a cleaner, deducing the psyche of the people, whose leftovers he cleans away, from the atmosphere of the offices and the respective waste disposal management.
The three stories are not interconnected causally; their succession is additionally juggled by the repetition of surreal scenes. Occasionally the two men exchange their experiences; the younger man, so it is insinuated, could possibly be the cleaner's son - after all, they live in the same house. At the same time the movie expressly avoids conditional or causal narrative relationships, as it lets the individual episodes exist beside each other, and it evades determining the diegetic status of the images.
The intention is to evoke psychic realities. It affirms the fleeting transition between imagination and image, attacking the walls of figurative identification, and it explains that no original image is to be found on the inside of the onion. All images are deflections, deferments, as the author has the young man declare in front of a portrait of Lenin. Formally, the same status is bestowed on the image of him addressing the young woman with Janis Joplin as on the realistic scenes. Only the phantom draughtsman, unto whom the young man explains the physiognomies of the burglars he has seen, warns against the dangerous quality of imaginations, as they could effectively affect real people. Only under the impression of a shock would the image of an opponent be engraved beyond doubt in the witnesses mind in such a manner that it later can be reproduced flawlessly, lectures the phantom draughtsman. All other images remain subject to doubt with regard to their reproductive status – this is the source of the movie's specific humour.
Michaela Ott
Credits
Script / Director / Producer: Adnan Softić
Edit: Sandra Trostel
Camera: Bettina Herzner
Cast: Yuri Englert, Ratko Danilović, Andre Santen, Iris Minich...
Music: Antilop (Ratko Danilović), Nova Huta (Günter Reznicek), Thies Mynther, Anton Bruhin
Sound Edit: Thies Mynther
Sound Recorder: Arthur Meinert & Daniel Matzke
Set Design: Ilke Penzlien, Christine Ebeling
Costume Design: Nina Galinec
Typography: kosmoskaukasus
Location Manager: Ulf Groote, Livia v. Seld
Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg