For some years now, a very artistic cinema has been establishing itself in the circle of the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HFBK) Hamburg, repeatedly tipping over into the experimental. In her films “Drift” and “Human Flowers of Flesh”, Helena Wittmann explored narrative conventions and the relationship between man and nature. Now comes Willy Hans‘ feature film debut “Der Fleck”, a shimmering, experimental coming-of-age film that received an honorable mention at the Locarno Film Festival. Both studied under Angela Schenelec at the HFBK, and their films are produced by Fünferfilm, a small production company that specializes in unconventional auteur films.
“Der Fleck” begins with the movement that pervades the entire movie. We follow Simon (Leo Konrad Kuhn), who doesn’t even go to gym class to the beat of the whistle, but leaves school, drifts around, smokes, greets a girl who is hanging out with a group. At home, he squishes cat food, blows a feather into the air above his bed and clings to his plastic water bottle through it all: the cinematic summer idleness of an adolescent with his T-shirt on backwards. Through a chance encounter, Simon ends up on a riverbank in the middle of a clique and, above all, in the middle of nature. Young people hang out, smoke, and later there is a wonderfully quiet and prickly rapprochement between Simon and Marie (Alva Schäfer).
When they end up dancing in the headlights of the cars to a pounding techno track, it is finally revealed that Hans uses many tropes of the (often stale) coming of age film genre and yet finds a completely unique approach to it. The focus of “Der Fleck” is not the story, but a space of association and the feeling of that time, when everything was in flux and nothing was fixed. The film shows the glances between young people, quiet, often trivial conversations, indeed: being for the sake of being, in which there is still time for boredom.
Paul Spengemann’s camera captures the decelerated hustle and bustle in haptic 16-millimeter images and, accompanied by the spherical sounds of Rajko Müller aka Isolée, Daniel Hobi and Christoph Blawert, also tells of cultural traces in nature. A cigarette butt is crushed out on a stone, Simon finds a sofa made from bulky waste, a bicycle tips over into the grass.
The curiosity of the drifters Simon and Marie, who eventually move away from the group and like and tease each other, is inscribed in the film itself. The camera repeatedly goes on journeys, focusing on the forest and the river rather than on the people or exploring the habitat of the river course, which is criss-crossed by caves. And it becomes an instance itself when Simon picks it up from time to time or we briefly look at the action from his first-person perspective.
“Der Fleck” marks out its own patch of cinema: unspoiled and sensual, media-reflective, full of allusions and metaphors and yet never detached.