Patrick Schabus

The short film recounts an episode from the life of the British art historian John Ruskin. His work on the copy of Carpaccio's painting "Sogno di Orsola" awakened memories of a long-faded love, which he described to his cousin Joan Severn in letters.

Nothing's happened again in Vienna. This 'nothing' is morbid, beautiful and pretty bizarre. Franziska Pflaum captures special moments of slowness in her film. Everyday observations line up in a dreamy and surrealistic atmosphere. The images of Vienna do not tell a story but describe a state. "Should the world meets its demise, I will move to Vienna, because everything there happens fifty years later" (quote by Gustav Mahler).

The longing for (false) comfort in the face of these demands is already addressed in the title of *The Ultimate Question to All Answers* (2019) to then—as a parable with no educational value, narrated by the onboard computer voice of a Flixbus to combat boredom during the ride—deliberately let it peter out into absurdity amidst the offshoots of escapism in modernity (conspiracy theories, esotericism, fixed book prices). The ironic lesson of Gülzow’s work: It is precisely in failure that resistance succeeds today.