Bolts of Lightning (Blitze)1999

The Sixth Sense.
If two letters in the original German title of Dietmar Brehm's new film were changed, it could be translated as Glances. The result would be coordinates of a mode of vision in which subject and object oscillate: A glance triggers flashes of lightening in the brain; synaptic activity during a dream replaces the glance. A man opens his eyes. He sees a cozy room with a burning fireplace; he sees an elderly person lying in the bed and then turning to ring for a servant; he sees a woman taking a shower, and a younger one in bed asleep. Suddenly, all order is reversed. It may be that the woman is merely dreaming of a voyeur; she may be entering REM sleep. She might be dreaming herself into an altered version of Psycho.
The feeling of discomfort caused by Bolts of Lightening is made possible by the relevance Brehm adds to his found footage: He permits the telling of a story which is turned completely around and, as in a dream, the story is nothing more than a subsequent synthesis of images which appear suddenly; beauty and transience are not just subjects, they are also a quality of the film's images.
(Bert Rebhandl)