Heavy Eyes

"Is this time, or space?" one wonders - watching a duplicated couple on a stairwell, faces male, female, observing, observed. Before them though, paredoila, perhaps, the stacked depth of images and noise, the noise, and under it we wonder if what we see is real or intended as real.

There is a couple on the stairs, and framed by them, their repetition mechanical and temporal, here and there beside themselves and each other and again, again in the unfolding of the suggestion of scenes. There are faces lit like Hollywood in the old days, all soft curves and lantern jaw; from this spawn echoes visual, outlines found and found and found in filtered footage. Seeking something human in the static one sometimes get the measure of the crystalline lizard people hiding within. Sometimes these distortions trail ahead of our protagonists, fairer still for their anonymity to call them antagonists - they tease toward meaning, identification, these slipstreams of potential.

There is movement, not just the cheery 'FOLLOW ME' of an airfield marshal in what might be a Volkswagen Beetle, a happy gathering and a lone woman decamping from a Lincolnesque convertible, a suburban street, that couple, those stairs. A strobe-like flicker, inevitably, a close up of a pair of broken glasses. A pair of pairs, indeed, enough to seek meaning - that old yearning for story, that hunger for old stories - boy, girl, discord - oh, the discord.

The sound is enveloping, excellent, a submarine hunting for its missing guitar, a synthetic-aperture-radar love-song, ambience built steadily from Jurgen Gruber's audio samples. The footage invites speculation - perhaps this is a very special episode of the German Democratic Republic's second most popular polytechnic romance? The low rumble, the clatter of trains, dots that are not dots inviting connections that are not connections. Like a mumbled lyric there is opportunity to interpret, a different connotation with each review.

Is it haunting? Perhaps - its mysteries are more of technique and source and intent than something innate, but for all that it still tickles the brain. Siegfied A Fruhauf has found something here, but has carefully removed everything but the slightest of clues. Schwere Augen, Heavy Eyes, is light upon them - not to all tastes but worth a look.