Carte de Visite - Der V'03-Trailer (2003) User Reviews

Minimalistic!

[Mort-31 · 5/10 · 26 October 2003]

I have seen short films at this year's Viennale Film Festival which must have required a huge amount of work, resulting in `experiments' of five minutes' length that were interesting for the filmmakers themselves but almost unbearably annoying for the viewers. The Viennale trailer by Ernie Gehr is exactly the opposite. It must have taken him exactly a minute to film the cloudy sky above him and maybe a couple of days to find and edit the appropriate sound material.

As a film, Carte de Visite is not worth a lot, of course; as the trailer of a film festival it is beautiful because it gives our imagination a lot of space to interpret and to analyze. But if you want, you may as well forget it.

Meditative Experience

[Tornado_Sam · 2 July 2020]

For the Viennale's big film festival every year, a well-known filmmaker was appointed to create a one-minute film to be a trailer of sorts preceding all the following work. In 2003, that filmmaker was Ernie Gehr - the well-known structuralist director of such films as "Serene Velocity", "Eureka", etc. This is all "Carte de Visite" is - as the full title states, a short trailer to begin the screenings. One definitely can't go too far analyzing and critiquing this one - after all, it's really just a meditative piece Gehr designed to provide a thoughtful opening sequence to the showing.

"Carte de Visite" consists entirely of a cloudy sky for about one minute, while one hears the outdoor sounds of birds and planes (which are never seen). This is all, it was never meant to be some deep, analytical film, just a beautiful and artistic view which can't get boring for the short runtime. As a trailer, a very fitting opening and it succeeds in what it tries to do.