After countless video conferences, birthday and Christmas greetings via zoom or teams, Digital Detox doesn’t sound like giving up, but like an unfulfilled promise. Finally sitting with colleagues over coffee again, smelling the smell of popcorn in the cinema again, without thinking about the mouth-nose protection of the Knurpsler! “The more digital the world, the more analogue the dreams,” says Jens Meure’s documentary.
He portrays a man who has long succumbed to the charm of the analog: Florian “Doc” Kaps is a crazy Austrian who bought up the last Polaroid work with his entire savings in 2008, at a time when the first iPhone was just coming out market had come. At the time, taking over a factory for instant film seemed like business madness.
Meurer accompanied Kaps for years, “An Impossible Project” paints the portrait of this odd visionary, but above all it is a hymn to everything analogue, to printing presses, telephone booths and jukeboxes, typewriters and push-button telephones. The digital revolution is supplanting so many things. In a shot with melancholic Woody Allen music at the beginning, a company building belonging to the camera and photo material manufacturer Eastman Kodak is blown up, then – almost physically torturing – you can see how records, film and photo cameras are shredded.
The company set to save the analog has a very fitting name: “Impossible”
Kaps’ attempt to revive instant photography did not look like a success story for a long time. His company’s name, “Impossible,” seemed more than appropriate. Kaps had no idea how to produce instant film at all; he was not allowed to use the Polaroid name and found that the chemicals he needed for his product were no longer being made. Developing your own recipe turned out to be an almost impossible task.
But Kaps, who buys his sausages from a family of butchers in the Vienna area, who to this day refuse to deliver their products to the capital, has an impressive, sometimes insanely funny persistence when it comes to beloved products or processes. As a Don Quixote of analogue things, he fights against the zeitgeist, meets other enthusiasts and collectors and even travels to Silicon Valley to find support for his analogue dreams on Facebook of all places. “In Doc’s biography,” comments the director, “I saw a story of resistance, rebellion against structures and the creation of alternatives. The classic David versus Goliath, so to speak. A motivating role model.”
If nobody uses the old techniques anymore, entire art forms will die out
With the pain of parting that images of shredded records and cameras evoke, the longing for things to touch, smell, taste, screw and press, the film hits a nerve, and not just because of the pandemic. Digital detox and slow food, vinyl and analog photography have been trending for a long time, handwritten and homemade are considered hip.
Meurer shot “An Impossible Project” consequently on analogue 35 mm film, for the soundtrack a 40-piece jazz orchestra with singer Haley Reinhart played the music, which was recorded as a direct cut on disk. The German designer and typeface designer Erik Spiekermann typeset and printed the titles by hand using an original letterpress machine. The film says that if nobody uses the old techniques anymore, companies and industries and entire art forms and crafts will eventually die out. So if you want variety, you still have to expose 35 millimeter film or play records.
Unfortunately, the celebration of analogue is becoming a bit intrusive, and the Manufactum philosophy of the film isn’t particularly profound in the end. Of course, man himself is analogue, which is why analogue things suit him. It’s also clear that music on vinyl and ’70s phones can be legitimate little escapes from an ever faster, uncomfortable digital world. Polaroid is now a toy for hipsters. And the longing for intensive, so to speak “real” experiences leads straight to the elaborately curated event. An evening with a live jazz orchestra in an old Grand Hotel that has been empty for decades (it is the final sequence of the film, the Hotel Kaps’ latest project) is staged in such an exaggeratedly anthemic way that every streaming evening seems more authentic.
An Impossible Project, D/Ö 2020 – Director: Jens Meurer. Book: J. Meurer, Franziska Kramer. Camera: Bernd Fischer, Torsten Lippstock. Editing: Michael Nollett, Andrew Bird, Zenon Kristen. Distribution: Weltkino, 99 minutes.