V-2

Eugeni Bonet


Celluloid filming of image-video (taking the images from a monitor) mounted on film. The latencies caused by the change of format and its blurs activate mechanisms of encounters and concealments. Journey through different fragmented urban surfaces, revealing apparently clandestine situations, creating questions, tensions in the visual and sonic happening.

 "At first, the British government told the public that the explosions were caused by faulty gas pipes". (V2 Rocket, Wikipedia)

V2, the title, refers to the famous German rocket that ravaged London's population in World War II (Vergeltungswaffe 2 or retaliatory weapon number 2). The first ballistic missile, whose lack of precision was not suitable for military purposes, was launched from the French coast against the English population in order both to create as much desolation as possible and to destroy their morale. A daily terror whose basis was the randomness of its impact.

The black and white video images that Eugeni Bonet retakes (transferred to super-8 film because at the time it was not possible to edit them on video) participate conceptually in this randomness of impact. They are micro-encounters with the city, its surfaces, objects, non-places and anonymous inhabitants where the blur, both optical and of movement, serves as a syntactic guideline or artefact of fragmentation.

The viewer is seized by a sense of insecurity, fear of loss of control, difficulty in thinking or concentrating, as the image moves from one place to another without purpose. The visual palpitations, the motor restlessness, the trembling, the noises (increased by an ambient sound in constant reverberation) manage to paralyse the spectator. Attracted by his participation as a voyeur, through the abstraction of fragments of life, city and found surfaces, he experiences a situation of visual anxiety before that which escapes him, which he cannot assimilate: signs without a subject, without defined forms, which force him to purify his referential perception to the point of complete divagation of the mind, since everything that is concrete may have been abstract at some point.

Technical datasheet

  • Title: V-2
  • Direction: Eugeni Bonet
  • Production: Eugeni Bonet junto a Toni Soler y Joan Subirana (desparecido). 1974.
  • Duration: 00:11:44
  • Original format: Super 8 mm
  • Formats: Betacam Digital - DVD
  • TV systems: NTSC - PAL
  • License: Copyright