The Airstrip

In the 21st part of his series "Photography and Beyond," Emigholz projects, as usual, a series of buildings into our brains and from there onto the screen: airports, highways and bus stops, department stores, market halls and warehouses, as well as churches, cathedrals, sculptures and monuments. Plus a prison, a stadium, an embassy, a duplex. The widely scattered architectures result in a frame novella: the ephemeral, capitalistic, religious-melancholic and moralistic world becomes momentously entangled in its purposefulness. Even after the dropping of the atomic bomb, narrated by a vaguely familiar voice, the viewer waits for the documentary bracket of an architectural design. But it does not exist, perhaps it never did. What is in front of us is a flat screen, for proof, illustrations from litter shows fly across the picture. The before and behind combine to form the actual construction of space and time, whose architect is none other than the viewer himself. "The Airstrip", as the final part of the series, does not offer a grand finale of architectural film history, but a brilliant desert landscape full of unexpected new beginnings.(Source: 64th Berlin International Film Festival, Catalog)