Rescue Grips

The song goes "I used to say, I'm ready, show me the way," and archive footage does just that. Taking as its source material an instructional film whose title is perhaps How To Transverse Industrial Landscapes While Transporting A Casualty With Or Without The Benefit Of A Stretcher (Or Assistance)" Nina Kreuzinger's film is an odd bird, but no less satisfying for it.

Metallic screeches punctuate white noise, voices sound, wheels on rails perhaps, the flicker of film and artifacts of celluloid, impositions of the frame of things outwith the frame, ghosts of a pre-post-industrial past. Found footage recovered from an era before the recovery position, steady framing of two men about to demonstrate, but not emotionally.

Jasmin Hirtl's sound is a vital part of Nina Kreuzinger's film, but it's an uneasy melange in support of an uneasy construction - from precarious positions others are extricated, but the audience is not necessarily as easily rescued - it falls to those watching to interpret, to make their own entertainment. There is singing that might be backwards, and it's that overtly Lynchian parallel that is most easily drawn, and that surrealistic sensation of unease is the film's strength. While sometimes translated to English as Rescue Grips, the Rettungsgriffe of the title is more appealing if only because it offers less guidance - this is best when at its most mysterious.