Phantom Ride Phantom2017

In the early days of cinema “phantom rides” were films shot from the front of moving trains. Until this moment the camera was stationary, but phantom rides kind of invented motion as a new style of filmmaking. Siegfried A. Fruhauf explores the underlying sensation, the “phantom”, in these movements. (Viennale 2017)

From a "simple" camera pan through a journey into a ghostly realm, to a veritable trip: Phantom Ride Phantom carries out these three steps with cinematographic verve and great technical finesse. At the same time, the starting point for this phantom of a cinematic ghost ride is a single freeze frame, taken with a half-frame camera on an abandoned train track near Toulouse. The row of tracks, overgrown in gaudy red and green, arranged along a central perspective and at first, pulsating gently on its own, shapes the matrix of a continuously disruptive split image. Shots taken from a train window are fed into the dynamically pulsating flow—a snowy landscape passing by in changing directions, divided throughout by a striking split in the middle. A true spectral image–counter-image staccato unfolds around this central divide, in homage to
a Ken Jacobs "phantom ride" film. Left to right, freeze frame and moving image, driving direction and opposite direction, added to that, opposing motifs (train versus forested nature) — Phantom Ride Phantom arranges all of these contrasts in a frenetic flux around the fissure made visible here, which the cinematic perspective continually splits open within itself. At the same time, this empty middle is cross-faded in second-by-second succession, once by a tree, then one of the tracks, and finally, a seductive light at the end of a tunnel intervening ever more psychedelically into the film. An underworld of images, which refuses to come to rest; perception begins to establish itself until, following a final, metallic eruption and short flickering phase, the original image (shaking) becomes visible. Phantom Ride Phantom thus traverses more than
100 years of avant-garde history in compressed form, and insinuates that the journey is, by no means, over. (Christian Höller)