The author found and reworked the reels of a home movie from 1939. This work by Rosenberger is a protest: an indignant outcry with no nuances. The preexisting material, shot by the father of a family, consists of three “stories”: 1) my beautiful wife brings a beautiful child into the world. This is how they look at me; 2) outside on the street, a military parade goes by. Look at the uniforms and the crowd that has gathered. And there’s Hitler! 3) And this is where we spent our vacation: on a sailboat, in the forest. With an optical printer, Rosenberger filmed the three stories, intervening on various levels: he emphasizes the borders of the image by filming it in its entirety, he slows down the rhythm to dissect these watermark images of a precise moment in history, he has added a soundtrack that associates throbbing and squeaking, a shrill noise, and Robert Schumann’s “Mai, joli mois de mai, tu seras bientôt de retour”. A film about home movies that denounces not so much the contents of the document, as its logic of implicit links, its grammar which has already become ideology and which (though sentimental in nature) leaves no room for sentiment.

Alexander Horwath