THE DISCOVERY OF THE CONTINENT KAIYA

Clouds, a herd of sheep, a grazing cow from behind, a river bed, bus stops, grain silos, clouds, rest areas, industry, power poles, tunnel, mountains, clouds. Kaiya is on the train. She travels cross-Europe. Anonymous places string together and separate again, faces and conversations merge. Like clouds. Kaiya “is doing Interrail”, as it was called in the 1970s, when this affordable train combo ticket still meant the way to the absolute open air. Usually after school or before graduation, the citizen-parents handed their citizen-children over to the care of European railway companies and thus released them, sheltered in a certain way, into neighboring European countries. The splinted route into liberty. Freedom that delivered the feeling of a wild, hippieesque life – despite the fully developed rail network. Even if there was no freeway, no desert dirt tracks, no greater danger than missed connections. But at least you could get on and off as you pleased. Utilising a hedonistically confused self as a compass. Oh, Interrail! The magic word that has you click the heels of your red shoes in order to escape the everygrey familiar.

So much for the myth of Interrail, which you should definitely know about when taking a seat in Marvin Hesse‘s NOT NOW OR WHEN OR WHY BUT YES.

Kaiya, the protagonist, a 23-year-old British student. She is not a daughter of the middle classes, and it‘s not the 1970s, train travel is “retro” and at the same time CO2-friendly transport sparing you flight shame. The Interrail ticket still exists, it is even subsidized1 by the EU, for the children of past-tense parents, for the descendants of Generation X, of parents who once were distant relatives of Linklater‘s Slacker or Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Interrail is a promise for those considering the world less a will than an idea. Interrail was and still is a projection whose cinematic quality becomes once again palpable in NOT NOW OR WHEN OR WHY BUT YES. The train journey as a quintessentially cinematic hetereotopia. An ephemeral home in which one is moved while sitting. That you yield your seat to others after a certain time

belongs to the basic makeup, just as in cinema. The train ride’s diegetic space is a world racing by behind the window. You see an exclusive moving image presenting fields, forests, suburbs, and cities – an illusionary space-time phenomenon created in the minds of travelers and cinema audience alike. This is also why the agenda of Kaiya’s journey does not need any logical order. Paris, London, Sofia, Belgrade, somewhere in between Dover. The change between reality and its possibilities accompanies the protagonist Kaiya and the filmmaker Marvin Hesse on their way across a continent. It is a crossover of travelogue and inverted cinema direct: of unrestrained subjectivity and tolerated observation. Marvin Hesse is not a fly on the wall. He belongs to the sneaker caught by a camera tipping to the floor, to the breath on the soundtrack after a more exhausting “chase”. He is there, all the time, behind the apparatus to which Kaiya willingly exposes herself. Even with her sensations, opinions, her powerlessness. She reflects on the medium, its appropriations, and speculations, she is assailed by a guilty conscience regarding her ability to travel, to cross borders, borders that in the end do not secure a humanistic European vision but Western wealth, borders hardly bridgeable for migrants. She fumbles for words that all too easily might trigger fremdscham – the feeling of being embarrassed on her behalf – and the impulse to take refuge in one’s own imperturbation. But Kaiya takes risks. She talks so unhamperedly, it sometimes hurts. She laughs, she flirts, she babbles. It stays in the film. Because it happened at that moment. Kaiya takes nothing back. Whatever gets caught, forms a thought or becomes an image, Kaiya has jotted it down, drawn, spoken, played it. It joins the loose sequence of encounters. Ephemeral and fleeting. Like everything else does, when you travel, and life and time push past the train window as if on a screen. Marvin Hesse’s film lives from the rhythm of movement, from the ostensible arbitrariness with which places are entered and left, from all the discontinued contacts, the colours of the cities and the undertones of moods. You can feel when Kaiya is annoyed, see when she brushed the camera off, when she uses the camera gaze against or for herself. She is the one who decides to keep instabilities, and thus, in a way, offers the film “climaxes” that are dramaturgically useful. She reflects the medium, the situation of recording, the “we” and the “I”.

Hesse’s camera is characterised by how it does not let go. It keeps at it. At Kaiya looking out of the train window, nodding off on the upholstered seats, drinking coffee in somewhere, and looking out of the train window again. The camera tells about the discovery of a continent that naturally cannot be further than Kaiya’s gaze, Kaiya’s sleep, Kaiya’s train of thoughts, Kaiya’s drawings, Kaiya’s photographs. Just the continent of Kaiya – Marvin Hesse is her ethnographer, her chronicler. She is his image. And her own. This makes NOT NOW OR WHEN OR WHY BUT YES a special artistic co-production of model, voice, and cinematography.