Heinz Emigholz: Rote Wüste

Videostill from Heinz Emigholz, Rote Wüste, 2012, video, 21:12 Min., color, sound. Courtesy of the artist, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2024

Buildings as protagonists: filming for 'The Airstrip', the third part of artist and filmmaker Heinz Emigholz's 'Decampment of Modernism' series, took place in 2011-2012 in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Brazil, the US, Japan and the Northern Mariana Islands. The 108-minute film features numerous buildings and sculptures: According to Emigholz, he is interested in the "founding deeds" of modern architecture in the first half of the last century.
One of the locations was the Northfield Memorial, built in 1985 on the island of Tinian, part of the Northern Marianas archipelago in the Pacific, which was conquered by the US Army in 1944, as it was of strategic importance in the Second World War like no other.
Here he filmed a single 'point of view' shot of the journey by car through a seemingly paradisiacal tropical landscape, finally arriving at two nondescript looking concrete excavations - the loading pits from which the two cynically named atomic bombs, 'Little Boy' for Hiroshima and 'Fat Man' for Nagasaki, were lifted onto planes, only shortly afterwards to cover the world with unprecedented destruction, death and suffering.
140,000 people in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki were killed instantly or died in the following three months as a direct result of the explosions, a turning point in modern warfare and the only use of nuclear weapons in war to date. 6 August 1945 was global Day Zero, the day we proved that world history need not continue.
Emigholz writes: “Imagine an airspace into which a bomb has been dropped. The bomb has not reached the site of its detonation, but there is no way to stop its speedy approach. The time between the bomb’s release and its explosion is neither the future (for the ineluctable destruction has not yet happened) nor the past (which is unavoidably about to be extinguished). The flight time of the bomb thus describes absolute nothingness, the zero hour, consisting of all the possibilities that in just a moment will no longer exist. A story that will cease before it has begun (…).”
'Rote Wüste' is the first of eight music videos Emigholz shot for the band Kreidler. The intended track for the video from the album ‘Den' (Bureau-B, 2012) is 9:33 minutes long, but the shot was considerably longer. Without further ado, the musicians decided to adapt their track to the more than twice as long take and remix it - and not surprisingly, the version of the track shown here is now the much more popular one. As journalist Tina Manske put it: "The filmmaker and the band are so well suited to each other because they both pursue the same goal: to explore space in momentary shots while pursuing their own aesthetic without compromise”. – Niklas Goldbach

Credits: Film: Heinz Emigholz »Northfield from THE AIRSTRIP, Decampment of Modernism Part III« produced by Pym Films, with tips of the hat to Ueli Etter, Till Beckmann and Filmgalerie 451

Music: KREIDLER from »DEN« (Cd, Lp, digital download, Bureau-b), October 2012

(c) 2012 Heinz Emigholz, KREIDLER, Bureau-B