Gwenyambira Simon Mashoko

210 minutes, BetaSP, 4:3, colour, PAL

Hours beyond time, more like a blank interval, which we no longer sense as time; cessation, surrendering to a strange individual rhythm — A song about a journey, the destination of which is another journey, a song about light that does not belong to the dry landscape; a song that erases its own traces and achieves calm — Without understanding the language of the song, we do not perceive it as some kind of indefiniteness, on the contrary, there is an order we can understand (a familiar house) — An intensive circular stillness of the film: we feel as though we are sharing the space with the film, as though we entered and there is no way out — beauty as instant truth of the film; the film’s own aesthetics recedes to the verge of immanence of the man’s presence, for which the language of the film would be too limited — (the film contains fragments of a 1976 documentary Mbira: Njari, Karanga songs in Christian ceremonies by the music ethnologist Andrew Tracey)

Petr Kubica,
Catalogue of the 7^th International Documentary Film Festival Jihlava, Czech Republik,
October 2003

(…) For Pilz the camera is an instrument that allows him to expose the inside of the seen. His radical personal films represent a captivating audiovisual journal, whose seemingly private observations (private eye) are in fact deep social and aesthetic probes and focused answers to impulses from the outside; the melody of static images in this more than three hours long film is an extraordinary challenge for the audience.

Petr Kubica,
Catalogue of the 7^th International Documentary Film Festival Jihlava, Czech Republik,
October 2003

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Original title Gwenyambira Simon Mashoko
English title Gwenyambira Simon Mashoko
Produced by Michael Pilz
Concept and realization by Michael Pilz
Cinematography by Michael Pilz
Original sound by Michael Pilz
Music by Simon Mashoko (1917?–2007)
Additional material by Andrew Tracey (1974) and Franz Fellner (1996)
Edited by Michael Pilz

Austria 2002
Original language Shona, English
Intentionally no subtitles

First public screening January 2003, International Filmfestival Rotterdam

Festivals Rotterdam (NL), Jihlava (CZ), Duisburg (DE), Graz (AT)

Installations Harare (ZW), Vienna (AT), Munich (DE), Maputo (MZ), Belgrade (CS)

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