Noli Me Tangere – The View

DCP, 41 minutes, 4;3, colour, stereo
1994 originally filmed on video high-8

After 20 years I met Aija Laura again. She invited me to read Jean-Luc Nancy's touching essay Noli me tangere. It was August, 2013 and we were planning to film at the Biennale di Venizia for her doctoral thesis. I found some video recordings from 1994 when the filmfestival Arsenals in Riga/Latvia, had invited me to do a workshop there. I had fallen in love and again I fell in love. We did the work in Venice very well but finally we did not stay together. In July, 2014 I finished this little piece of beautiness and reflexion by finding Max Richter's musik Europe after the rain which comforts me.

Michael Pilz

Noli Me Tangere – The View can be experienced like a little cloud entering your sight and you need not to invest any energy in understanding what and why but be aware what this little cloud does with you until finally it fades away.

Michael Pilz

I aim to harness the tension between the unfamiliar and the familiar so as to render the inner stories it reflects transparent and recognizable. Everything depends on your personal mindset, your vantage point, and your perspective.
The film develops on several levels. On the one hand, objectively, superficially, on the level of featured objects. On the other hand, subjectively, on deeper layers, in the cinematic subtext, in the unspoken, where words fail us. In the unconscious and in its sign language.
The film approximates its true form in a roundabout way through its sign language, it doesn’t blurt things out. In the sense of the aforementioned relationship between subject and object, the process of gaining self-knowledge through encounters with the world continues in every viewer.

Michael Pilz, Retrospective 2023, Vienna

Original title Noli Me Tangere – The View
Produced by Michael Pilz
Shooting time November, 1994
Shooting location Jurmala/Riga/Latvia
Completion July, 2014
Cinematography by Michael Pilz
Original Sound by Michael Pilz
Edited by Michael Pilz
Music by Max Richter, Europe after the rain
Sound Design by Michael Pilz
With Laila Pakalnina, Gints Berzins, Aija Laura Zivitere

Austria 1994/2014