The Biblical Title According to the Bible, in the beginning was the word. I don't believe that, and even the title "In the Beginning was the Eye" expresses an antithesis. This is a film about the tension between two forces in film: the power of images and that of words.
	Bodo Hell Physically, Bodo is in my opinion prototypical for a person who deals with words. Which reflects the reality, as he is one of Austria's most noteworthy authors. In the film Bodo attempts to enter the world of images¾but only succeeds in entering the world of postcards, and he jumps out several times to compare the reality with the clichéd images.
	Interaction Between Mankind and Landscape I wanted to show how mankind has chewed up and digested the landscape, how society uses it as a food source, changes it by dominating the natural surroundings. In the film's finale, an ironic reversal, the human protagonist is himself colonized by the landscape.
	Eisenerz and the Erzberg The people in Eisenerz have consumed their landscape directly and openly by strip-mining the mountain's surface. The result is something which resembles a Mexican stepped pyramid in the middle of an Alpine landscape, the Erzberg. This is a true gem, a wonderful image and a fascinating cult object for visitors.
	Salzburg In Salzburg on the other hand, the townspeople leeched the salt out of the mountains, but from the inside. I noticed that this process of hollowing out is reflected in the architecture: Salzburg has become a Potemkin village. If you climb a mountain and look down, you'll see that the old Baroque buildings have been gutted and covered with aluminum roofs. The old interior walls were removed to make room for additional floors. The buildings are now like hollow teeth covered by nothing more than aluminum foil. At the same time, the city has become a reflection of itself, all facets and details of which can be purchased in postcard form.
	Objets trouvés - the Postcards I collected over 15,000 postcards at flea markets and antique shops; 1800 of them were used in the film. The confrontation between the old images, many of which were retouched, and the reality led to sudden avalanches and other surprises. Sometimes the reality matches what is shown on the postcard, but in many cases, mountains shown at certain locations aren't really there.
	The Principle of Retouching Photographs that don't correspond to the cliché of Austrian landscapes are regularly retouched by postcard manufacturers. At the Attersee for example there's a building which has been deleted from all Austrian postcards for decades because it doesn't fit into the otherwise immaculate landscape. The resident of this house once said in an interview that he doesn't really exist.
	Postcard Idyll The world depicted on Austrian postcards is cozy and clean. Even the ski-lift stations seem to be made of wood, and the modern Alpine huts are built in a rustic style, leaving the impression that they've been there for ages. In the past the perilous mountain roads were depicted proudly, but as more and more people began writing about traffic jams on the reverse, all roads disappeared from the other side. The buildings are freshly renovated, the streets are clean, and hardly any people or animals are visible. Many French and Swiss postcards show futuristic buildings standing in the middle of the Alps, and Italian cards often have people, crumbling façades and weather-beaten buildings.
	The Two Sides of Postcards Originally I set out on a search for striking pictures of cities and landscapes, so the texts on the reverses were more or less undesirable elements until the words began to practically force their way into the film. Just like the image and soundtrack of a film, each postcard works with a division of word and image which is manifested in the fact that the picture is on the front and the writing is on the reverse. The sun is always shining on the front, and the sky is blue¾the reverse tells of non-stop rain. The world on the front is an idyll, on the reverse there is mention of skiing accidents and broken hearts¾and quite a few old cards were signed with "Heil Hitler".
	The Nazi Sun In Salzburg I found a card which had a swastika shining over the city in place of the sun. The sender wrote, "Unfortunately this sun is not yet shining over Salzburg." When I read that, I literally shivered: This postcard was made by an Austrian publisher in 1932. You could eat off the streets in Salzburg, and whenever we were shooting, we saw cleaning crews at work, keeping the city spotless. As soon as anything falls on the ground, it's swept away immediately. In the film, you see the Nazi postcards and then there's a scene with a street being cleaned; one could say that the past is swept away.
	Sound and Music "In the Beginning was the Eye" has no dialogue¾at least not in the conventional sense. At the same time texts pervade it: There are poems by Bodo Hell and Ernst Jandl on the apartment's walls, and you can see a haiku by Friederike Mayröcker on the refrigerator door. The complex soundtrack is extremely important for the film to work¾the editor, Frédéric Fichefet, and the composers Bernhard Fleischmann and Dr. Nachtstrom spent over a year working on it. The visual and acoustic levels serve as a kind of two-way echo: Language, poetry, images and music are intertwined and make up a networked whole.
	Word and Image The world of words accompanies Bodo on his journey through images of Austria, and eventually the letters seep into the film, attempting to take over more and more space for themselves. They whisper and scream, and every now and again a postcard turns around so that its message can be read.
	Art / Science One of the inspirations for this film was the idea of combining art and science, integrating them into a mutually enriching process. It all began with a question asked by urban researcher Heidi Dumreicher: Can scientific knowledge be used as an inspiration for an art film? The Austrian Science Ministry answered this question with a yes, subsidized the project and integrated it into the national research of the developed landscape. It was an exciting though at the same time daring idea, using knowledge (and funds) from science for an artwork. And the resulting dialogue was extremely interesting and fruitful for both sides.
	Scientific Process I spent an entire year working with the results of research on the Erzberg, on the ideal motif of Austrian postcards and the emergence of various speed systems in inhabited landscapes, and then integrating this scientific basis into the screenplay. Historian Verena Winiwarter did research on the question of why certain motifs are used again and again on postcards and others are not. I made use of her findings in the postcard journeys. And so science popped up again and again in the film, then retreated into the background before reappearing suddenly. What's interesting about that is the fact that the audience is unable to recognize the scientific aspect for what it is, which was my intention. As a result, the viewer consumes the film as a whole¾including the science, but without noticing it.
	Time and Speed In the past several years pedestrian zones have been set up in the centers of many towns and villages. Everything is slowed down there, decelerated¾at the same time life on the edges of urban areas is fast, cars move right past them on highways. In the fades in Salzburg and Eisenerz you can see that public space was used in a completely different way in the past. There was a democracy for pedestrians: The woman with the pushcart walked through the center of the town alongside horses and wagons. When a person dares to step off the sidewalk today, they're putting their life in danger. The past's democracy of movement no longer exists.
	Film Technique This film alternates between single frames, at six frames per second, slow motion and time lapse. Bodo is not a professional actor, and for that reason he's unable to show his emotions on command in the way the film demanded. For that reason, I shot some concentrated footage of him: We filmed Bodo at six frames per second rather than 24 while he walked four times slower than normal. That doesn't affect the film at the speed of Bodo's movements, but the audience sees a quadruple concentrate of Bodo Hell's expressions and the wrinkles in his forehead when he's thinking. In Eisenerz and Salzburg on the other hand, fast motion is used so that everything rushes by, then pauses in super-slow motion at two spots. "In the Beginning was the Eye" is also about filmic time and filmic space, about the cinema's four dimensions.