Ketamine - Behind the Light shared the top prize at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in 2009. The secondary title is Video-Diary IV.
The film appears to be simulating the visual hallucinations and feelings induced by ketamine trance. One could also take it to be an avant-garde exercise in form and aesthetics. It is also simply a travel diary.
The title of this review is a quote from Friedrich Hölderlin that is heard in the film.
Ketamine is a tranquiliser as well as a hallucinogenic, and there are effects that suggest this symptom, such as a continuous sloshing sound heard during a transit down a dark tunnel filled with road lights. There's also a close-up of a cumbersome somnolent elephant burnt onto moving images of a colonnaded tunnel. Later the elephant's eye is shot in close up on it's side, in stupor.
Another layer of meaning, a profundity or pseudo-profundity, whichever way you look at it, is hinted at by a lovely shot of a red flower in a forest, which really looks like a receiving dish and an antenna (this perspective suggested by the voice-over).
Along the same lines there's a voice-over saying, "I believe that every honest man must say that the Earth is beautiful". There are outstandingly beautiful layered shots in what looked like an Alpine location. Similarly to Nathaniel Dorksy, Carsten Aschmann here used a technique where the near foreground obscures the background, offering glimpses now and then. There's swaying maize heads, behind which is a lake and mountains pillowed by cumulus. A shot full of wonder takes place below a quince tree canopy.
There's some good abstract stuff too, the camera zooms in on raindrop-coated glass at night, going into reflections of light, zooming until the view is inchoate, and through the other side.
The final section of the film takes place in Venice, where black and gold gondolas with luxury linings and baroque decorations are fetishised. A beautiful super-yacht, its lines lit up at night is traversed on the Lagoon. Close-up moving shots of the canal banks from the river vertically wipe into one another, and the final of these shots is upside down. Looking down we see a gondola move through a group of gigantic black fish that seem to be somehow basking, and only the nearby ones are disturbed. A still from the latter shot has been used to advertise the movie.
Other really nice stuff included a transition between tunnels, presumably in the Alps, where the tunnel comes out of the mountain for a short period and goes back in again almost immediately, the green vanishing. Then there are fireflies swirling round a rail, and a pair of man playing Frisbee by the shore.
One of the good drug-perspective shots is of two gnats flying headlong into each other, just prior to collision one gnat stops and pirouettes round, something that you could only see in slow motion and is probably quite a rare thing to see. A different light shone onto something that looks quite everyday, and reveals that they are living at a different speed from us, able to react almost instantaneously.
Really really enjoyed this one, renewed my faith in the short form of films.