emancipates him from the camera; it gives him more control over the media-related state. The performance is all that one has to set against the camera’s gaze. If I was filmed from a voyeuristic perspective, I wouldn’t have this possibility.

Heimerdinger: That’s why I had to ask for his permission to show what I stole from him.

Peters: But where do we recognize the difference between these two shooting situations? Is it the quality of the acting that makes the acted waiting differ from the real waiting? Ideally, you would work with actors so professional that there would never be any discrepancies regarding the quality of the acting. So, ideally, were the two versions of waiting in the film really indistinguishable from one another? If we get the resolution, when Berger acts and when he waits, it appears so evident afterwards; but viewed without knowing this beforehand, the two parts could also be cleverly acted. That’s what I found so interesting about it: both the performance and the film pursue an authentic expression. That’s what makes it so indistinguishable.

Heimerdinger: Maybe my directions for Wolfram Berger should have been more precise. I should have said, Play yourself waiting. But I didn’t phrase it that way then. With the nonactors I just made a series of Polaroid photographs and my first two videos (Picture Sample). But that was also when the theme addressed playing with posing and ‹authentic› behavior.

Peters: I find interesting that the idea of photographing an authentic scene is always connected with photographing unobserved. In itself, the presence of the camera alters the scene. And now, constantly under the gaze of a surveillance camera, one could also wonder whether this being under the camera’s gaze could possibly become a form of existence.

Holschbach: That brings me to the term ‹screen tests›. Walter Benjamin first made use of it. (see: Benjamin’s Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit) He uses it in connection with film actors who, instead of acting before an audience, act before the camera and are tested by the camera.