Many PE Many PA (1998)

None of the assignments, agreements and word games in this film can be completely explained. Here, in Baumann and Kaltner's cinema, it is not only about what you can see and hear, but in equal measure, at the very least, about what is unsaid and unseen, about the residual enigma that the world retains. Many PE Many PA is a border patrol on the interface between documentation and avant-garde. The narrative circles around two men who are engaged in shaping glass and fixing it into place - in black and white workshops, in desolate factory halls and in houses set on mountain peaks. A story enfolds almost incidentally, a narrative for transparent cinema where, within the four corners of the screen, fact and fiction mirror each other. The film appears to follow a hidden system suggested by strategically scattered signs and the pale connecting links between picture, texts and sound. An agreement reached over the telephone, a movement towards (and past) each other, a mystery concerning smuggled goods (in an off text), hidden parcels (in the picture), a lonely game between hands (scissors, paper, stone) are brought into conjunction with the manual work of the protagonists in glass, iron and paper. Near the end, a young woman appears as if in a spy movie and the men, in a scene which could come from a criminal saga, move in the opposite direction to each other, culminating in a drastically exaggerated, fleeting encounter. Many PE Many PA ­ cryptic cinema about working on art.