 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
Ralfs Farben
|
 |
|
If that invaluable 1980s anthology Incredibly Strange Films is ever updated, Lukas Marxt’s Ralfs Farben deserves a prominent place in it. For it is incredible and strange, strange and incredible … To provide even the usual, basic, preliminary information – like where and when it was filmed, who is in it, and so on – seriously distorts the experience of discovering it innocently, for the first time. Because nothing here is clear or simple. We glimpse two men – one, mainly – in what appears to be a mostly deserted place. We hear a voice that we presume to belong to Ralf, although he also often refers to Ralf in the third person. And we see a dog in both its living and dead states. The voice speaks to us of fantastic concepts: “planetwork”; walls built between the dead and the living; technological inventions that already “half exist” because we can imagine them. Are we listening to someone who is severely mentally disturbed, wholly outside consensus reality? At the same time and by the same token, this voice makes a lot of political sense as it rails against a State based on money and control. It’s like struggling with the biography and legacy of Wilhelm Reich, a whiplash journey from staunch Freudo-Marxist critique to trippy cloudbusting and UFOs, via the mysteries of the organism. If we experience a problem accepting what Ralf says, the problem may well be entirely ours – not his. We’re too stuck in the empirical facts, in narration and explanation, in backstory. Don’t rush to consult the notes about Ralfs farben in some catalogue or website database; just fly with it as it unfolds. The images veer from landscape studies into rolling digital collages that we can scarcely decipher. Marxt specialises in generating material that seems to emerge neither from the human mind nor the human hand. We travel somewhere else entirely, beyond our brains, our bodies, and our stable, rational reference points. Cinema has given us many kinds of poetic documentary, but the 74-minute Ralfs Farben (made by Marxt in close collaboration with Michael Petri) offers something truly new and indescribable – and impossible to shake off or forget, as I can attest five years after my initial viewing of it. Ralfs Farben is among the most remarkable and distinctive films of the 21st century so far. MORE Marxt: Marine Target © Adrian Martin September 2019 / July 2024 |
