Die nahe Schwelle

At the Treshold

Steffen Ramlow

Germany 2003

DV (Super 8) / Beta SP PAL,

colour & b/w, sound,

14 min. 30 sec.

DIE NAHE SCHWELLE (At the Treshold) is a personal reflection about the nature of memory and its intertwining with emotional complexes like loss and grief, family history and imagination. The approach moves in the area of conflict between recognition and conjecture, presentiment and repression.

The point of departure for the search for one's own identity in this case is the traumatic experience of the death of a beloved grandfather. The memory of him is triggered by photographs and films of the grandfather, Hans Ramlow.

Questions immediately arise: How is memory constituted? From narratives, from images, from sensations? What is the nature of the impulse that comes through to the present out of the past, and how is it formed? The grandfather becomes a sign of the filmmaker's own identity in the projection and in intuitive imagination.

A feeling of love can be discerned in the montage of the interweaving photographs and film footage of Steffen Ramlow and his grandfather. The continually returning emptiness in the filmmaker's images stands in opposition to the horror vacui and creates a melancholy quiet in the visual sense, which gives the spectator the space to imagine his or her own family history.

Personal self-portraits point to the painful process of self-discovery. The grandfather's smile, as he lets the sand run through his fingers on the beach, becomes, in the film's context, a reassuring sign of the acceptance of the passage of time and along with it also of death.

Steffen Ramlow