Eigentlich eigentlich Januar

As was the case with his diary films November, 1-30 (1998) and December, 1-31 (1999), Jan Peters' project was clearly defined: to expose a three-minute roll of 16mm or Super-8 film every day for a month. Thus, EIGENTLICH EIGENTLICH JANUAR consists of 31 clips: holidays in the snow, to-do lists, a Tati poster, a bicycle route in Neukölln, students in Kassel, old family photos, advertising columns, stones, graves, and much more. The superimposed analogue material that he himself developed, leads to coarse-grained, flickering, discolored shots with streaks and scratches, so that the present seems almost as historical as the often-cited 80s. A breathless excess of off-screen text combines thoughts on Don Quixote, Walter Benjamin, Robert Flaherty, Jonas Mekas, film funding without conditions and immortality for all. Obsessive image-making, collecting, searching, archiving and questioning become an autobiographical contribution to cinematic historiography. (Birgit Kohler)