A dancer as filmmaker refrains from superfluous movement in a villa in Brittany, giving way to an individual as well as social state described by the French philosopher Paul Virilio as “polar inertia”. Frame by frame by frame, Paul Wenninger makes the rounds standing still, in an initially completely empty salon, with his back perpetually turned to the walls – and above all, to the windows: A stormy time seems to fly by while the relationship between outside and inside gets shaken up, even if the views “out” granted to the observer largely consist of projections: trees, beaches, parks shot in high-speed, time-lapse mode. If one repeatedly watches O as a loop, it emerges as one of those works in which the various “bodies” found in Wenninger’s forms of artmaking – choreography, installation, animation – are very compactly merged. This is pivotal because here everything indeed revolves around Wenninger himself, as he inertly stands at high speed in red sneakers to minimalistic rocking music by Peter Jakober, with the timeless elegance of a New Wave star from the late 1980s: Self-portrait with a spin! Chairs and other furniture briefly thunder across the floor, but someone like Wenninger does not take a seat. In a quick-witted contemporary sense, O is also a thoroughly old-fashioned clip. One briefly ponders whether the letter “O” is not instead a zero value in the coordinate system, which in permanent spin transforms into a round bubble in midst of which the time/space continuum takes pause. Indeed, one thinks a lot this (Covid-19) year, and this here is but a brief text about a film that will preoccupy for a long time to come. (Claus Philipp).

Direction: Paul Wenninger
Script: Paul Wenninger
Editing: Micheal Derrossett
Music/Sound Editor: Peter Jakober
Sound Mixing: Studio Christoph Amann
Carpentry/Rigging: Marc Brouard, Denis Marc, Ekarat Tosomboom
Assistants: Nolan Dufeé, Luan Leprohon, Enora Boillet, Alice Le Scouarnec, Roland Michon, Theo Lefébure
Producer: Kabinett ad Co., Villa Rohannec’h – Département des Cotes D’Armor
Technique used: stop motion