Ralfs Farben 2019
If that invaluable 1980s book “Incredibly Strange Films” is ever updated, RALF’S COLOURS deserves a prominent place in it. To provide even the usual, basic, preliminary information – like where and when it was filmed, who is in it, and so forth – seriously distorts the experience of discovering it innocently, for the first time. Because nothing here is clear or simple. We glimpse two men – one, mainly – in what appears to be a mostly deserted place. We hear a voice that we presume to belong to Ralf, although he also often refers to Ralf in the third person. We see a dog in both its living and dead states. The voice speaks to us of fantastic concepts: “planetwork”, walls built between the dead and the living, technological inventions that already “half exist” because we can imagine them. At the same time, this voice makes a lot of political sense, as it rails against a State based on money and control. Meanwhile, the images veer from landscape studies into rolling digital collages that we can scarcely decipher. Cinema has given us many kinds of poetic documentary, but RALF’S COLOURS (made by Marxt in close collaboration with Michael Petri) offers something truly new and indescribable. (Adrian Martin)
www.ralfsfarben.com