Gravity’s Volkswagen

Nineteen

The Zander Beetles

To date the avant-garde film-maker Matt Zander has made and released ninety-eight movies, which to the untutored eye might seem uncannily and unnecessarily similar. They all have essentially the same title, Kafer — the German word for Beetle, and they are numbered Kafer 1 through to Kafer 98.

Each movie consists of exactly one hundred shots, each shot lasting exactly one hundred seconds. That’s ten thousand seconds in total, which, since the movies have neither opening nor closing credits, results in works that are precisely 166 minutes and 6 seconds long.

In the pre-digital age, when the drive bands of projectors were likely to run slightly slow or fast, timing was inevitably a rather more hit-and-miss business. Technological advances have enabled Zander to become more thoroughly formalist.

And in truth Zander began making movies when digital media were unheard of, when videotape was still a novelty. He exposed his first footage in the early 1970^s, when he was a very young man, using a Super 8 amateur movie camera.

The story goes that he acquired this camera immediately after he’d acquired his first car, a Volkswagen Beetle. Taking a few shots of a new car is a common enough thing, but whereas most amateurs would be inclined to do endless pans and zooms, close-ups and action shots, Zander simply set his camera on a tripod and filmed his parked Beetle for exactly one minute and forty seconds, a little less than half the length of a roll of Super 8 film. Eager to finish the roll, he found a neighbour who also owned a Beetle and filmed that for a hundred seconds too. The rest of the film he ‘wasted’.

There is no shortage of Volkswagen Beetles in mainstream movies, the most conspicuous and irksome example being the Walt Disney Herbie series. Elsewhere Beetles can be found playing significant roles in Woody Allen’s Sleeper, Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil and Wim Wenders’ The American Friend, to pick three more or less at random. Among makers of art films, Zander has claimed kinship with Francis Alys, whose Rehearsal 1 shows a red Volkswagen Beetle repeatedly attempting and failing to drive up a steep hill in Tijuana, while on the soundtrack musicians rehearse some Mexican ‘danzon’ music.

Having filmed ‘still lives’, as it were, of those first two Volkswagen Beetles, Matt Zander had found his subject, and he has never found another. His entire oeuvre consists of accumulations of hundred-second shots of Beetles at rest, never in motion.

This may sound perverse and restricting, but even the most casual viewing of Zander’s works shows a rigour and a scope that is anything but limited. Over the decades he has been to every continent, to hundreds of cities, to thousands of locations; suburbs and ghettos, parking lots and private garages, rain forests and deserts, scrapyards and war zones, and in each location he has selected a Volkswagen Beetle, set up his tripod, and using ever more sophisticated cameras, filmed it for exactly one hundred seconds.

The reach, the variety, the obsessive quality of his work is extraordinary. In each shot the Beetle remains unmoved, a given, a constant in a chaotic world, a world of untold stories, while around it landscapes change, people and animals wander in and out of frame, smoke or debris drift around the car, gunfire or screams are heard on the soundtrack. Zander’s films become melancholy, spiritual meditations on technology, diversity and decay.

He has said he will only make two more films, Kafer 99 and Kafer 100, but nobody believes him. At that point he will have filmed ten thousand Beetles, a good number to be sure, but even allowing for natural wastage, destruction and recycling, that still leaves him with many millions of subjects, many millions of Beetles still to be filmed. Some would say his career might be just beginning.