Press & Reviews

"" - Fyens Stiftstidende, Tuesday 2011/Aug./23th, by Capar Vang

With a steady hand, German director Martin Bargiel guides us into a dark and dangerous world, where fragments of memory blend with paranoid delusions and neither the audience, nor our tormented main character are able to distinguish fantasy from reality.
The peculiar short film about poor Mr Schenker from room 659 of the rundown hotel, presents its story as a visual tour de force of filmic and narrative twists and surprises.
The camera flies through cracks and in an ingenious way falls in and out of the main characters point of view. This enhances the feeling of insecurity and unease, so we never quite know who's looking or where the memory fragments come from.
For once it's okay, that the cinematic techniques take a front seat, because it's not imagination and creativity that are missing, when the past is unraveled and we have to find out, what exactly happened when the woman from the apartment next door was killed against the sidewalk six stories down.

..."garish sodium sickness of David Fincher"...    TakeOne, Thursday 2011/Oct./27th, by Rosy Hunt

Screened as part of the MAD WORLD short film series at this year’s Cambridge Film Festival, Martin Bargiel’s AUGENBLICKE is a sound, stylish psycho-thriller which melds the shabby baroque of Roy Andersson with the garish sodium sickness of David Fincher.

Our hero is Schenker, a stooped, chainsmoking loner in a noisy apartment block.  He’s grown uncertain in his solitude, to the extent that he and we are never sure whether he is knee deep in one of those cruel, semi-lucid dreams which ape the dull quotidian of reality, only to hurl our assumptions scornfully askew at every turn.The camera clings to Schenker’s heady POV only to duck away, blinking and cringing in confusion – lolling drunkenly on tabletops or wet paving stones as we struggle along with Schenker to make sense of his own narrative.

The heavily evocative hypnagogic segues from one reality to another are constructed with deft restraint, and Bargiel uses touches of CGI as an augment rather than a crutch.  The pace and editing are so confident and beguiling that even a couple of jump scares strike out as dynamic and not trite.  The natural distortion of condensation and streetlights, along with the ebb and flow of the sound design convey the central character’s depersonalisation, driving him to a point where he will accept any concrete reality that he can cling to – even if that means admitting to murder.

Bargiel has been working as a freelance film director for over five years, and his examination of child poverty “Finn & Tom” won 1st prize in the cinematic commercial competition, “Zukunftsgestalten Initiative – against child poverty”.  AUGENBLICKE has been screened at 25 film festivals all around the world and continues to accrue nominations and awards for merits such as inventive storytelling.  We hope to catch up with Martin soon to find out about the three screenplays he has under development, all of which he plans to direct.

 ..."a dizzying waltz through a carnival's hall of mirrors "...   December 2011, Encounters Film Fest Critics by Jonathan Bygraves

The opening shot of Martin Bargiel's Augenblicke, seen through the eyes of its main character as he stares vacantly back at his reflection in the distorting mirrored wall of an empty elevator car, may seem a mere matter of cinematic trompe l'oeil, yet it serves as an elegant motif for the film in its entirety, which plays like a dizzying waltz through a carnival's hall of mirrors in which the disoriented viewer is scarcely able to orientate themselves amidst their new surroundings before being whisked away into another, more sinister sphere of consciousness.
The consciousness in question is that of Schenker who, upon leaving his apartment block one evening, stumbles upon the dead body of a fellow resident who has apparently fallen from one of its high windows. From this seemingly straightforward beginning, the film progresses into a maze of shifting perspectives and time-frames as the increasingly baffled Schenker tries to piece together the preceding events; or have they, in fact, happened at all? Rather than a Rashomon-like meditation on the perspectival nature of memory, the film's elaborate construction seems to call into question the very plasticity of reality itself as Schenker is plunged ever further into a many-circled Dantean inferno.
What is remarkable is that, in spite of its complexity, the film is propelled by narrative coherence rather than hampered by it, and the seemingly breathless pace of its meta-narrative is in direct contrast to the slow near-mundanity of many of its individual scenes. This latter stillness, coupled with the woozy, jaundiced visual aesthetic reminiscent of Roy Andersson, only serves to make this surreal Borgesian labyrinth all the more unnervingly nightmarish.

..."From the first idea it was designed as a short film different to all other short films"...
Cannes Impossible Film Contest Interview, Mai / 2011, by daazo.com

Read the whole Interview on the daazo homepage. Below you'll find the questions and the first 1-2- sentences of Martin's answers.

How would you describe your short film?
From the first idea Blink of an eye was designed as a short film different to all other short films that came out of my hometown Hannover in Germany. During film school all our short films looked alike. ...

You also have the scriptwriter’s, DOP’s, producer’s and the editor’s credit on your short film. How did these artistic approaches work together? How could you perform all the roles?
Writing a script is a total pre-production phase, so that this doesn’t interfere with the shooting at all. Similar to being the producer, or the editor. Editing is entirely post-production. ...

Tell us a little bit about the production of the film. What kind of difficulties did you have to face while shooting?
The production was a huge undertaking. I had a passionate crew, but my intentions for the film were even bigger. For most of the visual sequences we needed the locations to be built with moving walls while shooting. ...

Participating in the Impossible Film Contest I guess you have an open attitude towards making short films available on the Internet. What is your opinion about online distribution?
Times have changed and we as indie filmmakers can be happy about this new distribution way compared to the once only way of distribution: „offline distribution“. ...

Are you plannizg your first feature film or do you want to keep on doing shorts?
As much as it is a lot more comfortable to keep making short films, you have to make the step to the next big thing if you want to be recognized as a serious film maker. ...

 ..."acclaimed short in open air cinemas"...   Neue Presse, Thursday 2011/Sep./27th, by Gunnar Gerold

Li Europan lingues es membres del sam familie. Lor separat existentie es un myth. Por scientie, musica, sport etc, litot Europa usa li sam vocabular. Li lingues differe solmen in li grammatica, li pronunciation e li plu commun vocabules. Omnicos directe al desirabilite de un nov lingua franca: On refusa continuar payar custosi traductores. At solmen va esser necessi far uniform grammatica, pronunciation e plu sommun paroles. Ma quande lingues coalesce, li grammatica del resultant lingue es plu simplic e regulari quam ti del coalescent lingues.

Interview with Martin - Stadtkind, December 2011 by Anna Pakosch

Li Europan lingues es membres del sam familie. Lor separat existentie es un myth. Por scientie, musica, sport etc, litot Europa usa li sam vocabular. Li lingues differe solmen in li grammatica, li pronunciation e li plu commun vocabules. Omnicos directe al desirabilite de un nov lingua franca: On refusa continuar payar custosi traductores. At solmen va esser necessi far uniform grammatica, pronunciation e plu sommun paroles. Ma quande lingues coalesce, li grammatica del resultant lingue es plu simplic e regulari quam ti del coalescent lingues. Li nov lingua franca va esser plu simplic e regulari quam li existent Europan lingues. It va esser tam simplic quam Occidental in fact, it va esser Occidental. A un Angleso it va semblar un simplificat Angles, quam un skeptic Cambridge amico dit me que Occidental es. Li Europan lingues es membres del sam familie. Lor separat existentie es un myth. Por scientie, musica, sport etc, litot Europa usa li sam vocabular. Li lingues differe solmen in li grammatica, li pronunciation e li plu commun vocabules.