Fa(h)r (weit)
Excerpt from "interview with Stephan Sachs"
Mike Hoolboom
Excerpt of: Fascism and the Fantastic
The Independent Eye Vol. 11 No. 2/3 Spring 1990, Canada

MH: Can you describe what the film looks like?

SS: It’s built on long takes. The opening shows a freighter being untied from its mooring, shot from above. We see the anchoring rope line and movements of the sailors The second section shows a fixed line, a metal rail with the moving horizon behind. Now the voyage really begins. Its movements are very musical. Normally the horizon is fixed for the eye, but now it swings up and down, like a wave. This wave motion was changed on the printers until it became like breath for me. When you see it on a big screen you nearly get seasick. After that it goes into the inside of the boat, moving towards a diagonal line. Then it moves into a completely abstract section taken from the overhead wires of a train. These are worked in a very musical way. Both the rope at the beginning and the wires at the end, mark a diagonal line across the frame. In between you have a movement between the horizontal to the diagonal. These two kinds of travels are movements into abstraction. You have the impression of things moving but it’s not true, it’s you moving. In fact, it’s only cinema, only film. The movements of the crew around the rope that casts the ship away at the film’s beginning was very wonderful for me. It was like a theatre piece I happened on; I couldn’t have constructed it. To see it later was marvelous.

MH: And the title?

SS: It’s a word game. ‘Fahr’ means to go, to travel, the ‘h’ is in brackets, without it, you get ‘far’ in English which means ‘weit.’