Continuity

Omer Fast | Germany

long
85'
English subtitles

Audience Award

6,88/10

Video artist Omer Fast makes movies in loops. When you interlock two of those loops, you get a lemniscate: one of those horizontal figure eights that endlessly flows back into itself. It starts with a father, a mother, and a son who returns from a war. And then things get weird.

In November, Remainder by Omer Fast will arrive in Dutch cinemas. According to the press kit it will be ‘the first feature film by video artist Fast’. Wrong. First there was Continuity. But we won’t hold it against them: this film is so obscure that it doesn’t even have its own IMDb page.

The reason: Continuity is actually not one film, but two. First there was the short film Continuity in 2012. A 40-minute loop, in which two German parents wait time and time again for their son, who’s returning from a war in what looks like the Middle East. In 2015, Fast made a sort of sequel to this: Spring. Again a 40-minute loop, but now created for five screens, in which we see the same son as a teenager.

The film is an unsolvable puzzle: the truth is subject to change, and always dependent on what came before, and what follows.

Both were created as video art, and mainly shown in art galleries. For this feature film version, Fast mixed those two loops together. The result is an unsolvable puzzle: the truth is subject to change, and always dependent on what came before it, and what follows. Maybe the game Jenga is a better metaphor: all the blocks form a whole, and the more blocks you pull out in order to understand it, the greater the chance of the whole thing collapsing.

This may all sound a bit complicated and academic, but that’s not how it feels. It feels more like a kind of fairground ride: just when you think you’re standing on solid ground, it falls away from underneath your feet again. A bit dizzying, but also breathtakingly exciting.

Joost Broeren (translation by Marjan Westbroek)