The programme watched most on German television is a film of an endlessly long, unbroken car trip along empty country roads that is broadcast regularly at about four in the morning. The sleepless viewer sees the road from the perspective of the driver. The car's speed, which is quite fast, is constant. The landscape opens out at a fast tempo: trees, little churches, houses all succeed each other. It rains occasionally and the windscreen wipers sweep back and forth across the screen. The film is without sound. There is no beginning, no end, no story. The sky is overcast and suggests an early, rather grey morning. There is no oncoming traffic, there are no living creatures - only that constant, somewhat hypnotic sense of speed and the soothing consumption of the landscape. Darius Ziura has taken this theme of a car driving along a country road at a constant speed and used it to make a real time road movie. Ziura's film seems to be the same but has a fundamentally different effect in that it seems to be implying a moral. The drive begins at night and ends towards dawn. Instead of being shot from the driver's perspective, the camera is mounted under the front of the car, radically changing the perspective. The horizon appears relatively high on screen and the road, full of bumps, cracks, pot-holes, skid marks, races towards the viewer at an alarming speed. This gives the video an element of disquietude, almost of oppressiveness. We have here no relaxed view through the windscreen, no sweet little churches in the distance. Instead of natural daylight, here we see sharp light/dark contrasts and the dramatic morning sky. This kind of 'folded' perspective also fundamentally touches the public's sense of direction, purpose and controllability.
– Marianne Brouwer
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Darius Ziûra ° 1968 Lithuania
lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania
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