...AS THEY PASS...

«Keep running... Touch walls... Keep moving... Take a breath...» The introductory text of ...as they pass... is spoken calmly and quietly. The voice doesn't tell a story, it conveys atmosphere. It's superimposed over images which flare up briefly and are punctuated by relatively long intervals of black frames - whenever the viewer begins to orient him or herself. And suddenly, the images in Bödenauer's animation - made with silk paint on glass -- start to overlay one another: They're arranged by layer, extending into the screen's depths, and the uppermost layer flows apart, revealing the one below it. In the end they seem to have all moved away, their composition has turned into strips of color which zip upward or to the side. This is accompanied by an increasing volume of sound. At the film's conclusion there is openness rather than a point.
The motifs in Bödenauer's film are repeated: the corner of an interior space with large windows and wooden slats on its red floor. Flies on glass. Broken panes. Someone wrote «...despair is often...» in the dust on one with their finger.
This footage was shot at Vienna's Kahlenberg-Hotel, which was demolished in 2005. Until that time it spent years in a coma, unused and dilapidated. The hotel's history, analogous to the theme ...as they pass..., revolves around: memory, the selective emotional remembrance of the past, things which are not (no longer) physically present. Certain images appear repeatedly, are revealed and reconstructed, are mixed up, change, liquefy or merely fade out.
Bödenauer's complex formal grammar - which has been developed in the course of extensive experiments - speaks of mechanisms and structures of memory in a way which is equally sensitive and exciting.(Nina Schedlmayer)

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