Richard Hefti, Into the Future (1987, 7'30'')
The camera slowly glides through a yellow 'mist of time'. As if produced by a seismograph, sensitively drawn crayon and chalk lines appear, moving from left to right across the screen. The suggestion slowly unfolds. A line turns into zigzag, enhancing the intensity, then stops and starts anew. Rhythmical hand clapping sounds as the engine of inevitability. What then follows is 'imagination': a drawing of a human being, barely intelligible words and numbers, cuttings from a nineteenth-century portrait photo, a machine component, a Ferris wheel. The images are reminiscent of primitive scribbling on the wall of a dimly lit cave, like a video variant of écriture sauvage. Without a conscious attempt at translation or …n appeal to knowledge or skills, the hand becomes an instrument that directly provides us with a representation of an unfolding range of associations on the theme of 'time'. In this ambience, the human figures appear to be lost in the wilderness of developments 'into the future'. The video relativizes our own scrawling in life, as if it really does not matter much what we want from our future, or think we can make of it. When in the background the image reflects itself, time seems to be caught up in a loop. Our beginning is like our end; there is 'no future'.
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