Schmelzdahin
«City in Flames»

The basis of this film by Jochen Müller, Jochen Lempert and Jürgen Reble is found footage from the French-Canadian feature film ‘Ville en flamme'. Before the pictures and soundtrack were reworked, the original footage was buried in the garden, deliberately exposed to bacteria and microbes, and copied when the emulsion began to liquefy. The dissolution of the images – that is, the visible decomposition of the layer of film bearing the pictures – provides a visual equivalent to the disaster that forms the subject of the original film. The broad outline of the plot is still recognizable – it clearly involves a relationship between a man and a woman, for example – but the action is reduced to fragments of images and patches of colour that blend organically with one another on the course-grained film.