The section Night Sight curated by Markus Keuschnigg is dedicated to fantastic film. The diversity and originality of European genre film guarantees mind-blowing cinema experiences.
Down with Contentism!
Markus Keuschnigg
The best films, which is to say the most memorable ones, are those that are difficult to broach with words, where synopses fail and synapses are stimulated, the ones that make all algorithms surrender before them. Like in the years before, Night Sight once again hosts a feast for works rife with invigorating holes in the logic, with sprawling narrative ellipses and hackneyed story arcs that, however, delight us with their atmosphere, that overwhelm us on the sensory level and challenge us aesthetically. The vintage of 2024 has roofs, cars, and horses (!) eaten away by acid rain, a convent school student sensitized for Gothic horror sorting herself out in a neverending night and a devout American nuclear family father crucified, it has the demons of the past creep to the present and an idyllic Alpine vista become the clichéd backdrop for a juicy “Heimat-Horror”. What all these cinematic night owls have in common is that they follow the Aristotelean dramatic ideal with the aid of a basic narrative but that they mostly rely on audiovisual artistry between excellence, extravagance, and excess. In Tilman Singer’s CUCKOO, sounds cause the whole image to vibrate, which makes entire sequences repeat, while the image formats in KRAZY HOUSE change depending on the story level and the mental state of the main character, and LA MORSURE / BITTEN drops us back into the hypersensual, texture-obsessed fantasia of 1960s and 70s’ European genre film. Only bureaucrats and number crunchers alien to art and always on the lookout for a good film with a good story or good whatever, and despite the behaviorally problematic ones (almost) always being better, would criticize the sight of these radically tailored film-aesthetical stunners as possibly lacking logical cohesion. Night Sight does not have us plugging holes but plunging into them, it has us yearning for the irrational and immoderate and crying out: Down with contentism! Bring on the madness (Markus Keuschnigg)
