Synopsis

Back Trackis a showpiece of technical brilliance involving a highly complex story woven out of images and sounds from over 25 feature films. We peer into a space of floating, three-dimensional screens that merge, layered atop and made to glide over one another. Various found footage scenes are projected onto as many as seven movable, semi-transparent panes of glass at once, while a computer-guided camera photographs them frame by frame and translates the imagery into a three dimensional spectacle. At the same time, a host of lovingly constructed props introduce analog components that flit through this digitally Burroughsian cut-up cosmos of Widrich’s conjuring. The plot is seamlessly interwoven, narrated by an off-screen voice entirely in keeping with the film noir tradition to which Back Trackis evidently deeply committed: a woman, several men (a writer, a womanizer, a criminal?), each hopelessly under the spell of the siren-like lady... (Peter Tscherkassky)