In Blackwater Fever the cultured human being evaluates his ultimate status in nature or, for those who view the film more cynically, he returns to his primary condition. He is imprisoned in a road movie that refuses conclusion, is on the road in a landscape becoming increasingly arid and evolving into a barren desert. Everything is barren here, the landscape, the car, the driver, the images of war that now and again appear as if though a mist. Yet the filmic medium that chronicles all is equally barren. Often rough grained and speckled, turned to the sun, dazzled by a surfeit of life, and in its technical quality as changeable as the changing landscape remaining a landscape in spite of all.

Car, head and landscape: the splendid American Old Timer, the traveller and nature itself are three sickly apparitions that have come together in the hands of director Cyrus Frisch. Frisch primarily champions a revival of sixties minimalist art camera. Here not the dialogue but the silence is the primary drive; not the petrol but an exhausting, overwhelming sun is the primary energy; and not the emptiness of the landscape but the expressiveness of the driver's face is the primary image. For the drama that Frisch has in mind is reflected in the landscape revealed within the driver's head. He pushes him as if he was a contemporary Prometheus doing battle with the Sun. Hardly a scrap of dialogue and yet a Freudian drama of Greek allure, with Prometheus and of course with Oedipus for whom avoidance of his cruel fate is not possible-becoming blind.

Of course the road movie has always had religious connotations, for it was ultimately Christ who with his Way of the Cross divided into twelve stations, established its images right from the beginning. The first and still the best road movie ever, They live by Night by Nicolas Ray, hits the mark right at the start: contrite conversations in a car rushing ever onwards set the tone. So it is even more remarkable that there is hardly any speech in the road movie Blackwater Fever and there is no dialogue sending the viewer in any particular direction. It is the images themselves in their splendid montage that put us on the trail of Frisch's moral intentions. Frisch has an ideal Traveller in Roeland Fernhout behind the wheel; he very precisely replicates a handful of mythic characters upon his head, without in doing so tying down Fernhout. Only he ensures he does not let him have his verbal freedom, and rightly so. For when Fernhout briefly opens his mouth it is instantly very telling as well: the timid, theatrical accents of the Hans Kemna school immobilises Frisch's project for a moment - like a Brechtian intermezzo. Ellen ten Damme as Fernhout's partner might well have wanted to move her mouth but she has been rapidly adapted to Frisch's plan so that her white radiance forms a beautiful background to Fernhout's bronze head above all.