close your eyes

In Billy Roisz’s close your eyes knocking and rhythmically vibrating sounds take us from a black picture into a darkened room, its shades pulled down. At the film’s beginning a positive and negative image of a window that references this space reveals its function as a projection screen in hypnotic, almost psychedelic audiovisual compositions. Roisz skillfully takes us further, from this real space in the beginning sequence to abstract black-and-white images composed of fine lines that move in time with the fragile soundtrack, turn into dotted lines, then immediately puncture this linearity. High-frequency sounds and scratching noises by the musician dieb13 and arrangements of images that dazzlingly flare up cover these vertical lines to an ever greater extent. At first, a shadowy detail of the window leads back, again and again, from the fast pace of abstract images to that of the private space for brief moments. Accompanied by shrill high-pitched sounds, distorted brass instruments and gentle psychedelic noises, the viewer is lead into hypnotically colorful graphic compositions. Occasionally recognizable in a trance-like flurry of images, at second glance an image of a herd of hippopotamuses or grazing giraffes, tinted pink, reveals itself for a few seconds at a time. Vibrating yellowish-gray stripes flow into a black-and-white striped pattern, calling a herd of zebras to mind. Black frames punctuated in staccato fashion then show the window, heralding the end of the delirious dance: the return to the “real space.” Billy Roisz, inspired by the hallucinogenic experiences of painter, writer and poet Henri Michaux, has undertaken a fascinating trip into the abstract and absurd and to the limits of our perceptive ability.
(Christa Auderlitzky)
Translation: Steve Wilder