Maybe Not

The final sequence of Takashi Miike's remake of the film Graveyard of Honor [1975/2002] by Kinij Fukasaku forms the first scene in Oliver Pietsch's poetic found-footage music video. A short meditation before the leap into the void - and then the release of free falling. There follows a rhythmic chain of images of jumping and falling people, culled from movie history. With this montage of the cinematic tope of the falling body in space, Pietsch visualizes the ambivalence between the terrible yearning for death and despairing liberation. With the elegiac pop song by the band Catpower, Maybe Not the video takes on the poetry of a last escapist moment: >> We can all be free, maybe not with words, maybe not with a look, but with our mind. << The refrain is like a cynical sidelong glance in view of the horrible images of impact with the ground that begin to mix in more and more with the visions of falling as liberation. Amongst the artistic visualizations in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo [1958] and the playful computer effects of the Wachowski brothers are interspersed the sobering violence of Chan-wook Park's Old Boy [2003] or the bloody fantasies of Takashi Miike. These disparate sequences nonetheless meld to yield a homogeneous impression, which, thanks as well to the music, conveys a moving swan song to the ambivalence of freedom. (Frederik Geisler)