Fetish & Dreams

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Movie
Original title Fetish & Dreams
Poster Fetish & Dreams.jpg
Country of production Switzerland
original language English
Swiss German
Publishing year 1985
length 90 minutes
Rod
Director Steff Gruber
script Steff Gruber
production Steff Gruber
music William Steffen
camera Rainer Klausmann
cut Steff Gruber
Beni Müller
occupation

Fetish & Dreams is a film by the Swiss filmmaker Steff Gruber . The film about the New York singles scene of the 1980s is at the same time an excursus about the relationship between reality and fiction.

action

A Swiss filmmaker (S.) and his cameraman are working on a documentary film project in New York . The team is researching the topic of "loneliness". There are seven and a half million "singles" living alone in New York. An impressive backdrop for the project. The loneliness business is flourishing here. A whole branch of industry lives from it. Countless companies and organizations offer their services for singles and those looking for a partner. So does Lea and Marcy, two active women who offer courses for singles under the title “Fifty Ways To Meet Your Lover”. The two teach lonely women and men the " know-how " they need to find a partner. Another institution of this type carries out so-called "TV production single evenings". The course participants learn to use video technology . But this is irrelevant. The focus is on the desire to get to know a partner on this occasion.

Personals are also a popular means of finding a partner. S. starts an attempt at Village Voice . He only receives a letter. This also seems to be a question of the right technique. A student at Lea and Marcy said she received ten thousand letters in response to an advertisement. Obviously, no communication medium is unsuitable for looking for contacts. Another facility is called “Singles Date Line” - partner search via telephone answering machine. S. hears how women from the band advertise their advantages.

The phone is ubiquitous. "Pandorras Box" is an establishment that fulfills the sexual desires of lonely men - by phone and for a fee of thirty dollars per "session". S. investigates these things with journalistic thoroughness and records everything with the camera. At the beginning with a distance, as a mere observer. But S. is less and less able to evade his own concern. He's lonely too. A woman he had observed on the outward flight no longer leaves his mind. He only knows her name, Michèle, and knows that she is studying music in Boston ...

In his own way, S. now tries to apply the know-how he has learned in the contact courses. His telephone search, however, leads to no result. So he decides to go to Boston. There he goes to all the music schools and sticks posters in the streets. Finally Michèle answers. There is a meeting. S. falls in love. Film history has finally gotten entangled with its own. He's going back to New York. His film work is taking a turn. Distance is no longer possible.

A few weeks later Michèle visits him in New York. They talk about being in love and their fears of being bonded. It becomes clear that there can be no future for both of them. Back in Switzerland, S. sits at the video monitor. What remains are image sequences that can be manipulated at will.

background

Steff Gruber's Fetish & Dreams is the thematic and formal continuation of the previous film Moon in Taurus , which thematically deals with codes within two-way relationships and the question of why relationships diverge. From more than thirty hours of material, Gruber filtered the ninety minutes that Fetish & Dreams, like its predecessor film , turns into a film somewhere between fiction and documentation. At the Locarno Film Festival , the film received a special mention for its handling of documentary and feature film elements.

With his second feature film, Gruber broke new ground, also in technical terms. Using a process developed in-house, the electronically video- rotated film was then copied to 35 mm , making it the first video transfer in Swiss cinemas.

Reviews

“Steff Gruber is an exception among Swiss filmmakers. Both 'Moon in Taurus', his first feature film, and now also 'Fetish & Dreams' oppose viewing habits that are attuned to the more conventional dramaturgies of feature films. 'Fetish & Dreams' continues what 'Moon in Taurus' (1980) had begun: filtering out a fiction from documentary material recorded for this purpose; make a feature film out of it, which on the other hand is also a documentary film, in which fiction itself is turned inside out into a sociological excursus about the relationships between people, between men and women in a particular social situation. Steff Gruber's approach, both when recording a film and when processing the material obtained in this way, is outside the norm. What emerges is something aesthetically genuine, a piece of the artistic world that was not previously anticipated in film theories. "

- Martin Schlappner, Neue Zürcher Zeitung , September 27, 1985

“The most beautiful love film, I think for a moment. Perhaps because it puts you in a playful mood, and perhaps also because it tells of an upside-down world and also of trying to cope with your own world. Always in the balance between fiction and document. 'Fetish & Dreams', after 'Höhenfeuer' another but also last highlight in the Locarno competition. "

- Basler Zeitung , Verena Zimmermann, August 19, 1985

"An excellent excursus on the relationship between reality and fiction."

- Zoom (17/1985), Urs Jäggi

Film festivals

Awards

  • “Mention spéciale” for the creative originality in dealing with documentary and feature film elements at the Locarno Film Festival
  • EDI quality premium

Web links