Jump Cut article (originally in German)

 Steve Sanguedolce: DEAD TIME (Kanada 2005)

 Von Michael Freerix

(German to English translation through Sherlock)

Sanguedolce is Canadian with Italian roots, who, as he says, made above all experimental films about family relations. In "DEAD TIME" he tries something completely different. It led long interviews with junkies and ex-junkies and installed these tone documents to acoustic, authentic portraits.

This sound montage forms the "film script" to "DEAD TIME" and the basis for its cinematic conversion. Beforehand Sanguedolce had its films, from which  material develops out, it piece for piece completed on the basis its that resulted at the cut desk. With "DEAD TIME" he invented new scenes, which fit that, which is tone purely told on that. It turned scene around scene, like with a feature. The exposed material was pulled afterwards by ink troughs, so that it schillert and pulsates in most different colours. This pictorial material was tone purely installed to the available.

"DEAD TIME" tells stories from the life some June gravel and places these behind cinematic. Since Sanguedolce works the film material over again in its very self-willed type, one has the fascinating impression over far distances to look at a verschollenes piece of handkolorierten silent movie. The scenes live on the impulsive picture energy, which radiates coloured flickering and  flickering. A time long is very interesting that, but it becomes never completely clear, that the film processes.

The film is surely coined/shaped by the authentic narrations of the drug-dependent, by their balancing at the edge of the abyss. They are heroes, who experience "bath trip". But which wants to tell exactly the film about it -?

Sanguedolce says to his output idea, him these humans would have fascinated. It interested it, it as characters, when individuals with depth and not when stupid types to it-place. It wants to positively represent it, be their language pipe. At the same time it treats the film material in a manner that it looks like a schillernder Drogentrip. In contrast to this stories, which tell June gravel, concern particularly of surviving with the drugs. The intoxication plays only

a Nebenrolle, it is, one understands the suffering printing, with which the Protagonisten is nonstop confronted, as intoxication status.

From time to time developed "DEAD TIME" a fascinating picture energy, which goes however into emptiness, into which emptiness leads. Also the tone level is compact and arranged varied. But the longer the whole lasts, the more ask myself I, to do what that actually together, the tone and the pictures? And which that is to actually be, an experimental feature? A play with picture and tone? Such a play here however hardly gives it, because almost nothing that is tone purely told on that, does not give it also placed behind - on the image plane to see. A voltage between, picture and tone thus cannot construct itself, but the flickering scenes impregnated by pulsating colours place above all their own production to the schau. They are for itself and resolve themselves in itself.

"DEAD TIME" is a narrative film, which concerns of drug experiences, and of these with a gesture of the experimental film tells. Perhaps it in addition, a poem actually are over the drug life.