Que se passe-t'il ?

How a look can be turned toward its goal by grasping and measuring its covetousness is shown in an exemplary fashion in What's Up? in a motif depicting a postcard of a painting by Titian in an eye-mark recorder. Elsewhere topographical test images of the human brain record stimulus-response patters during visual trials by measuring brainwaves (calibration curves). Research on the effectiveness of advertising investigates the question of what advertisements affect what regions of the brain, what scenes 'work' – images for an 'inward' colonization of the human body, at once a commodity and a market. What's Up? – in the face of the all-apparent and inexplicable similarities, the bemused question of a cause innate to all lingers. The film links its subjects into conceptual pairs in various jargons which appear to be laid out side-by-side in domino-like fashion ('test/money – money/credit – middle class/beauty'). It is an authorial text, condensed into intertitles with the character of pauses, breaks and cuts. Somewhere in Balzac's Comédie Humaine it says that we may all belong to a great conspiracy, whether we know it or not; but the inner and the secret need not be one's own. (Jörg Becker)