René Frölke
TRACES OF MOVEMENT BEFORE THE ICE / SPUREN VON BEWEGUNG VOR DEM EIS
Germania 2024, 89’
In a cellar in Zurich lies the remaining stock of a publishing house, densely packed, still packaged as if ready for sale. One of the titles seems to be inadvertently commenting on the books’ immobile state: “Memory Capsule.” People and objects succeed one another. What connects the scenes? What connects each thing with the other? It is an infinite process of self-disassembly. “I wanted to save the traces of these people – to capture everything, to stop the disappearance by absorbing everything. I felt time, like the glaciers of the ice ages, rolling over all these books, texts, images, sounds – and with it the whole knowledge project – turning everything into sediments. What it became is an attempt to tell a story from small moments, the by-catch (loosely based on Citizen Kane, I called them the “Rosebud Moments”). By looking at the finds that were important to me as self-reflective fragments, I began to reassemble them into a picture. It is my attempt to crystallize something from these vague concepts that we call religion, literature, painting, music, art.” (René Frölke)
René Frölke, born in the GDR in 1978, has worked as a freelance editor, cinematographer, and director for several years. As an editor, he has worked with Thomas Heise, Kristina Konrad, Lucia Bauer, and Max Linz. Since 2010, he has directed several films of his own, including Le Beau Danger and From A Year of Non-Events (co-directed with Ann Carolin Renninger), both screened at the Berlinale Forum.
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