#standby

This short film detaches and rearranges audio-visual material to explore the affectivity of cruise terminals in standby mode, thus reflecting how such a mode similarly runs through the filming process and the scenes that result from it. Visually, the film leads the viewer through a variety of motionless infrastructures – from an entry hall to gangways – creating a montage of fragmented images that radicalizes the sense of social detachment often ascribed to places of transition (Augé, 1995). Yet, although lingering on these infrastructural fragments, the camera captures and generates a pulsating tension: a humming that becomes almost painfully tangible and near unbearable. Noisy reminders of busier times, these tensions also point to the ephemerality of stillness and of standstill. Meanwhile, the film’s soundtrack merges pollution data turned into music with the babbling voices of the privileged, a mix that signifies the political scope of cruising as a contested global practice. As the film ends, the soundtrack fades while the final image gives us another fleeting glimpse of transformation. While standby has a circular rhythm that constantly opens up for new beginnings, it also touches precarious ground: in pandemic times, the question ‘what comes next’ (Simone, 2017) haunts a hard-hit industry, revealing standing-by as an uncomfortable and hard-to-live with practice of enduring – sometimes longer than we can stand.

#standby was produced in collaboration with Berlin- and Hamburg-based video artists Friederike Güssefeld (director), Stefan Rosche (director of photography) and Iwan Schemet (sound), and with financial support from Hamburg University, Germany. The film displayed at the ephemera website is a short version of the original film: https://vimeo.com/318160606.