Park Of Remembrance

Parco delle Rimembranze

16 minutes, 16 mm, colour, 1:1,38

On the one hand life, on the other hand descriptions.

Friedrich Nietzsche

An October evening in the Parco delle Rimembranze, San Elena, Venezia.

The sun has just set. A telephone booth is silhouetted against the pink western sky. A woman is making a phonecall. Off in the distance young people are leaning against the counter of a snack bar. Close by, although not visible a newspaper stand. People come and go there from the docks. A man is waiting for the lady on the telephone while smoking and apparently enjoying the lovely evening. Mankind between day and night. Parco delle Rimembranze takes the events so casually, so coincidentally, a single, seemingly motionless perspective. The position and the view of the camera are detached and indifferent, objective as it were. Still at the same time there is an defined distance, a clear optic and an exact position as if seeing through the eyes of someone looking on. Sounds – voices, barking dogs, ringing bells, a ship’s motor, blurred signals from a radio nearby – seem to anticipate the picture in an evergrowing, magical way. Although in accordance with movements, they seem to come from another world, from an inner rather than an outer world as it were.

The picture fades out entirely after ten minutes, surrounding us with the night while sounds still remain audible. Now, in nearly complete darkness, the sounds become clearer and it is possible that for the first time we hear what they have to say. Almost automatically we remember the earlier events, regardless of whether they went by unnoticed or not, having appeared so casual and incidental to our eyes at the time. We become somewhat aware of the power of the pictures reminiscent, inherent, from within; pictures which are also prospective or perhaps anticipative. We become more conscious of them or we can at least sense them. It could very well be the night, withholding the pure, outside images, which makes them visible.

Parco delle Rimembranze is a film which offers us the opportunity to reflect, to observe and to listen and thereby experience something that happens when we slowly close our eyes and expose ourselves, not yet asleep to dreams, to uncertainness and chance, to unwanted events.

Michael Pilz, Vienna, September 1987

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Original title Parco delle Rimembranze
English title Park Of Remembrance
Produced by Michael Pilz
Concept and realization by Michael Pilz
Cinematography by Michael Pilz
Original sound by Othmar Schmiderer
Edited by Michael Pilz

Austria 1987
Language Italian, English
No subtitles

First public screening 31st January, 1988, International Filmfestival Rotterdam

Festivals Rotterdam, Wels (AT), Triest (IT), Riga (LV), Vienna (AT), a.o.

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