The video tape begins with a look at several pictures from a book on art history whose pages are turned over slowly, followed by figures in native dress, and finally stopping at the portrait of an Indian warrior. A quick succession of images that are often cut in two by black stripes or conversely, merely shown as narrow strips in a black frame, is accompanied by music. The soundtrack is Schubert's "Erlkönig". The images, frequently playing with light, as with the reflections of a rotating disco ball or the constantly repeated image of a revolving mechanism casting a shadow, soon are eclipsed by impressions from an African community. Analogously, the rhythm of drums and African song increasingly mingle with the "Erlkönig" and eventually silence it.

Black frames and picture strips reduce individual pictures to their characteristic details whilst still allowing the viewer to distinguish fragmentary impressions in the flow of images, establish associative connections of individual impressions and form the composing pictorial frame for the events. The frame also splits the worlds of images with regard to their contents, with images from the African world above, and scenes from western life with houses, high diving, and homosexual love below. Schubert's music is again faded in, a complete view shows a chink of light from a door kept slightly ajar, and that closes at the last words of the singer from the dramatic "Erlkönig" story: "… the child in his arms was dead". The door handle snaps shut.

"Die Distanz zwischen mir und meinen Verlusten" ("The Distance between Myself and My Losses") is a parable on two worlds and the way they are opposed to each other. Again, common prejudices in both worlds are playing an important role, as for instance in the picture of the African warrior, an illustration in a European book and the artificiality of the western world exemplified in the high divers in the flickering light of disco balls. Inserted text passages point behind the façade of the colourful flow of images: "But unimaginably more appalling if she had been born Peter Kuerten", and later … "but then the realisation that somebody had to be Peter Kuerten made it impossible to find happiness in it." It is left to the associations of the recipient whether he deduces the similarity to the name of a well-known sports commentator; what matters is the idea, the expression of the fact that the embodiment of a person or role is a chance affair if all one associates with it is a name or a fixed image with neither substance nor background to fill it in.

Here, Marcel Odenbach is sketching a self-contained picture: as the child dies in his father's arms in "Erlkönig", the door is closing, the flame of life is extinguished. Yet with the musical motif at beginning and end, he presents a story that turns full circle, that could be endlessly repeated. Thus the video tape may be read as an analogy to life, while the title adds a personal dimension to the picture fragments beyond the social level.

Lilian Haberer