Maybe not

Maybe Not, a found footage video by German artist Oliver Pietsch (2005), opens with the final sequence of Takashi Miike's Graveyard of Honor (2002), a remake of Kinji Fukasaku's Jingi no hakaba (1975). After a sort of meditative dance atop a tower, the protagonist throws himself into the void. At this point a chain of cinematic falls (extracted from Western and, in part, Asian cinema) starts: the nightmare of Scottie and Madeleine/Judy's falls in Vertigo (Hitchcock 1958), Neo's first attempts to move in the world of The Matrix (L. & L. Wachowski 1999), the riding of the bomb in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick 1964), Peter Parker’s training as a superhero in Spider-Man (Raimi 2002), the dramatic suicide in Germany, Year Zero (Rossellini 1948) and other falls extracted from Oldboy (Chan-wook 2003), Lethal Weapon (Donner 1987), Strange Days (Bigelow 1995), and others.

Formally, Pietsch's video consists of a juxtaposition of several variations on the same motif: the fall of a human body. Each fragment is the link of a chain perceived as unitary; although varying in direction within the frame, speed (however, slow motion unites almost all the fragments), format (for each the original is preserved), photography (black & white or colour), and despite being performed by different characters, the fall is a unique flow of movement gestaltically perceived as continuous.