Postcard from Oberhausen

Spread from a leaflet for Rachel Reupke’s 10 Seconds or Greater, 2009. Based on the production of royalty-free stock footage, it maps the logical progression of a director through a check list of popular scenarios designed to illustrate such commercially lucrative concepts as ‘communication’, ‘relaxation’ and ‘healthy life-style’. Design Fraser Muggeridge Studio.

Reupke’s startling new silent film Wine and Spirits (2013) started life as a series of photographs and adverts, which she used as source material or storyboards. She built sets based on these images and peopled them with a male and female actor, who move very slowly, as if barely able to release themselves from photography’s frozen time. Wine and Spirits is a kind of alcohol-soaked paean to bad relationships. The two actors pose in a variety of generic outfits and in different contexts: outside a club drinking lager, inside a pub drinking stout, at a restaurant, weirdly in 1920s formal wear, drinking sherry. The intertitles contain snatches of conversation and occasionally song lyrics. The final scene, in a generic pub environment, with a dartboard hanging in the background, contains barely any movement at all. The woman’s strained expression seems to betray by turns anxiety and contentment. The man’s expression is sardonic, and pregnant with menace as his mouth moves to speak.