Endeavour

Johann Lurf's film Endeavour slides between documentary, avant-garde film, and science-fiction. This highly singular combination of materials and techniques gives the viewer a feeling of flight, as the film continually evades the gravity of genres and definitive definitions. Lurf uses NASA footage from a day and a night launch of the space-shuttle that follows the booster rockets from take-off to splashdown. (…)The strict formal structure of the film – a structure taken from the original material – results in its uncanny and hallucinatory effect, where documentary transforms into avant-garde cinema. Here Lurf intervenes on time itself, which is no longer in synch with the footage, but now appears for itself in the rhythm of the cut, a circular dance taking six steps around before taking one forward. (Stephen Zepke)