Martin Putz
Austria | 2021 | 30 min
World premiere
Languages : German, Spanish
Subtitles : English, French
In the wake of Joris Ivens (the testamentary Une histoire de vent, 1989), among others, Martin Putz seeks to film the wind. Or the impossible task, although achieved, of capturing its hypnotic manifestations, by filming the things and the humans that stand in its way and use its driving forces.
Filming the invisible is a longstanding ambition of cinema, which, with the invention of recording devices, has sought to widen our perception of reality from the outset. How then can you “capture” the wind? Sitting on the Great Wall of China, Joris Ivens heard voices murmuring “I am the Foehn wind, the devil of gothic Europe. (…) I am the Nebraska tornado, or the horrible Simoom (…)” in his testamentary film A Tale of the Wind (1989) in which he, asthmatic, short of breath himself, sought that which
swept the desert. At the start of Wind, Martin Putz pays tribute to him, showing a sound engineer moving his equipment across a desert landscape to record the gusts. The Austrian director picks up where his predecessor left off by filming situations—a boat, a wind farm, artistic practices..., in which the wind becomes “visible”. His extremely precise framing makes it possible to capture its hypnotic manifestations, through the things and people that stand in its way, resist it and study it by taming its driving forces.
Emmanuel Chicon
