Every revolution of the camera becomes its own empirical space in Daniel Zimmermann’s Spheres. It starts with a man launching a wooden slat into the sky, prompting the camera to spin on its own axis, as it follows its flight path. Continuing along the formal lines of Zimmermann’s previous film Walden, the camera pans uninterruptedly, revealing with each 360° sequence a metaphysical journey and a tour de force of visual and emotional stimulation.
As the journey propels forward, 10 spaces of experience unfold in collaboration withvarious artists and performers. The intriguing parables confront us—often with a note oflevity—with the question: ‘Can the apocalypse be averted with the dissolution of the ego? ’On a formal level, the resulting visual canvases oscillate between the works of PaulMcCarthy, Pieter Bruegel’s paintings, Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames, and the visualprologue of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.
The camera moves unhindered, and mirrored hinged doors rotate into the picture, revealing persons at supper. Seated at a pompously laid table, they dine on every sea creature imaginable. The newborn’s cooing, bits of music and conversations—all coalesce and become entangled with one another. A man bends low to the terrazzo floor, gobbling down a saltwater creature off a plate. The camera continues to pan, rotating across the monochrome colour space, with its physicality weighed down by texture and materiality. Paired up, the youths are facing one another, musing about the logic of “seeing and being seen.” The camera slowly moves across the expanse of space, and a desert stretches out before us.
Not a single living being seems to move, caught in the stillness of time. The daylight is fading, and we observe three persons lying on the ground between the boulders; their spines are aligned with the terrain, their backs are supported by the arid soil. Away from the place of men, the desert challenges their bodies to become passive, to observe and absorb the surroundings.
The cinematic space swells and shrinks again, coinciding with that of breathing. Moving quietly from the right to the right, our view is shrouded in the darkness of a declining day, intermittently punctuated by patches of light, the reflections of other windows. The blackbird’s chirping percolates the silence, and a woman’s voice coming from inside the room addresses us, directing our attention inward. Our body increases in size as we inhale and shrinks as we exhale. The camera continues to rotate, now over the dense fog. The thick cloud of water is clearing gently, and the evening sun finally breaks through, revealing a meadow.
An unclothed man appears in the frame, walking backwards in the same direction and at the same pace as that of the camera, transforming the monotonous action into an undertaking of another state. A woman with raven hair emerges, pulling out a long piece of gauze from her mouth. The camera spans onward.
