Among the traditional tasks of the film avant-garde is to show what cinema is capable of when it is released from literary stories, from narration: how to interweave seemingly unrelated pictures, how to convert outer and inner spaces into a synthetic, unrealistic third cinematic space. Linda Christanell’s Picture Again is a study of such a space. In the confrontation, in its layering, the material is subjected to an endurance test. A few takes of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, a scene from Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, are the starting point for Picture Again: a woman and a man in a car, the murderess and her prey. The images in this sequence are accompanied and superimposed by documentary street scenes from Berlin and Madrid. A few birds flutter like birds of prey through an old horror film. Picture Again values a thorough structuralist formation, musical rhythm of the images, without refraining from the ecstatic. Here, as with all of Christanell’s work, it is about devotion to beauty, sensuality: about glistening crystal and the dance of air bubbles on a moving water surface, about a film kiss, which is re-staged as a tongue of flame in yellow and red, about the light and the color of the cinema, in flickering, shimmering images. (Stefan Grissemann)