Klaus vom Bruch superimposes upon Nazi propaganda films an advertising spot for Duracell Long Life batteries. Are these two types of image not based on the same authoritarian, alienating mechanisms? Do they not have the same objectives and adopt the same approaches to the mind of the viewer? Klaus vom Bruch denounces this contemporary imagery, breaking up its smooth flow with a ceaseless interference of other images, revealed little by little in the interstices of a phrase or a movement. In the brief moment when the battery closes, like an iron door, we see, emerging from obscurity, a face covered by a hand (none other than that of the artist himself at his editing table, taken from a performance at the 2nd Paris Biennale, 1980-1981); a B52 pilot flying over Japan; parading schoolchildren under the Nazi regime; and images of bombed-out cities. These fragments of memory progressively contaminate the field of vision, trying to make their way against the inexorable and repetitive advance of the battery, another kind of war machine. They multiply in a violent burst, finally arriving at the terminus of this journey backwards through history: the burned faces and mutilated bodies of the children of Nagasaki.

Stéphanie Moisdon
Translated by Phoebe Green