2017 Directed by Heinz Emigholz
Worn-down pavements, broken paving stones. Trees that jut out of the concrete, casting shadows on to crumbling façades. The centre of Tbilisi in the summer of 2013. Glimpses of side and main streets, over railings and under balconies, of an architectural cacophony. The voiceover spoken by Natja Brunckhorst reflects on the nature of streets and public spaces.
[6]
Conceived as at least a partial homage to Godard's One Plus One, his para-documentary about The Rolling Stones working in the studio to build "Sympathy For the Devil" from the ground up, Emigholz's 2+2=22 [The Alphabet] is another of his newer films that veers away from the perfected formulas of the "Architecture and Beyond" series. The new "Streetscapes" series is coming into focus, having now seen both this film and the contemporaneously released Streetscapes [Dialogue], and although this film is not as successful as that one, both are complex, intelligent efforts from one of our finest cine-spatialists.
In both films, Emigolz takes his camera into the street and examines "streetscapes" (buildings, sidewalks, storefronts, traffic lights, etc.) in much the…
Emigholz at his most structuralist. Not sure all the elements comment on the trip to Triblisi quite as well as he hopes, but I suspect it will all make more sense after I've seen the other films in the Streetscapes series. Anyway, his editing keep the dissonance of elements intriguing throughout.
Emigholz's conceptual frame is flawless as usual but he spends too much time inside the recording studio and not enough on the streets. In a way, this gesture even betrays 2+2=22's concept because the film ends up focusing more on the process itself.
How is a sentence like a street? How does performance change in public and private spaces? 2+2=22 works through the formal relations between the word, the note, the urban space, by moving from streetscapes of Tbilisi, Georgia to Emigholz’s notebooks to a recording studio. While the notebooks are presented unadorned, an off-screen voice accompanies the streetscapes, musing on their function as sites of memory and movement (a transcript of which is available here). But 2+2=22 spends most of its time in the recording studio, recording the band Kreidler at work.
It’s this sequence that stands out from the rest, a possible answer to the glimpses of words and architecture. The recording studio offers Emigholz a chance to record a process…
1+1+1 = 1+1+1
No connection whatsoever between the streetscapes, the recording studio and the notebook scribbles.
Three visual aspects. 1) the streets of Georgia, the city in which 2) the band Kreidler are recording their latest record, interrupted by 3) what seem to be scans of Emigholz’ stream of conciousness diaries. Then there’s a voice, female, speaking over the ‘streetscapes’ and notebooks, but never the band. The band creates, while Emigholz observes in long uninterrupted takes, whilst the other two facets seem to adhere to an unheard rhythm. This is the shape of the film.
Emigholz seems fascinated by space and how people inhabit them. How it influences people and their own creations. How the city surrounding it influenced the building in which the band is playing. In the same way Emigholz fills his notebooks with…
![2+2=22 [The Alphabet]](https://a.ltrbxd.com/resized/film-poster/3/7/2/8/2/0/372820-2-2-22-the-alphabet--0-230-0-345-crop.jpg?k=fc750a043c)