Watching the skies: Luca Buvoli and Holly Zausner share an interest in film, sculpture and airborne forms. Buvoli's most recent animated short explores the poetics and politics of flight. Zausner's 35mm film features rubber figures in slow motion above Berlin

In the catalogue of his recent show at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, N.C., (an extremely long and narrow spiralbound volume that continues the artist's practice of using eccentric formats for his exhibition catalogues), Buvoli recounts how the impact of current events moved him to examine his family's past. Since 9/11, he tells curator Ran Platt, "a whole culture of fear has subsequently developed around the experience of flying.... I felt strange giving lectures on my work after those events. And, the Flying project was--in name at least--about teaching individuals to fly, which was exactly what the hijackers themselves had gone through. I started to get paranoid about going through airport security and being on a plane with my workbooks and papers. Things could have really been misinterpreted, at least this is what I thought. What until that time I had perceived as a metaphorical space in the project's Beginner's level, now I have re-addressed as real issues of control and power. This has triggered my desire to explore my father's experience of flying planes."

The last shot of the film is of Buvoli's father being interviewed by his son (who remains off-screen) about his wartime experiences. In a reversal of the opening sequence of the artist's mother, the scene, shot in an antique-looking kitchen adorned with well-used copper pots and pans, starts with an animated portrait of Signore Buvoli, which is then filled out and replaced by a color video image. After recalling that he never spoke about the war when his son was growing up, he says that now he has forgotten nearly all the details of that time. "It's better this way," he concludes. Even though the younger Buvoli offers no rejoinder, we can be sure that he disagrees, for his allusive animated essay on the poetics and politics of flight is also an artful meditation on the necessity and complexity of remembering.

Holly Zausner: Rise and Fall

Practically invisible but absolutely essential to the opening shot of Holly Zausner's film The Beginning ... (2003) is a tiny, distant figure moving about on the vast flat roof of Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie. The camera, positioned on a higher building across the street from Mies van der Rohe's 1960s late masterwork, also takes in an array of buildings and trees, and some sparse traffic passing in front of the museum. Only the greatly reduced speed of the vehicles tells the viewer that this scene has been shot in slow motion, as was the entire film.

One can't determine what the person on the Neue Nationalgalerie roof is doing until the next shot, a much closer view that reveals a brown-haired woman repeatedly throwing a floppy yellow thing some 20 feet into the air and catching it as it comes tumbling back down. The camera follows the yellow object on its slowed ascent and fall. Occupying most of the flame behind this strange game is a panorama of the Berlin cityscape and an expanse of hazy sky. Another cut and we see an even closer shot of the woman, dressed as before in black sweater and black skirt, now gracefully hurling a large rubbery pink object onto the gravel-topped roof that she is standing on. The camera lingers a moment on the piece after it lands, allowing us to see that it is a stylized human figure whose attenuated arms and legs are connected to form two large loops on either side of the body. Disconcertingly, the bubble-gum colored figure quivers for a second after it hits the gray roof. The woman reaches to pick it up, then the film cuts away again to show her still in the act of reaching down, but this time to pick up a canary-yellow figure on a different rooftop in front of an ornately domed church (the historic Franzosische Dom, which today houses Berlin's Huguenot Museum) and, farther away, a giant construction crane. It was only after repeated viewings of the film in its DVD version that I noticed how the yellow figure echoes the gilded statue atop the Franzosische Dom. This doubling is hardly accidental, for everything in this beautifully composed and paced film, from the particular buildings visible in each scene to the prevailing meteorological conditions, is the result of careful planning and exhaustive retakes.