By Marieke Steinhoff. It's just a short moment, but the life of little Frank won't be the same any more afterwards: After a bicycle accident he loses the ability to perceive the world in moving pictures; everything that was in motion now freezes to five seconds still images. No soccer any more, no riding the bicycle or watching a paper plane fly. Frank loses everything he knew and sets out to find a new order to regain control over his life. He finds with Maria, a girl of the same age, who gives him a passion for chess and his first – and only – kiss, “a kiss of 1/10 of a second”. Both his love to playing chess and to Maria gives Frank new orientation for the coming years. Until another accident abruptly ends Frank's short life.

Two accidents, with a life-span of little more than ten minutes in between – 5 SECONDS begins and ends with death, trying to tell in the shortest time possible of the really important moments in life, of the fleeting nature of happiness and of decisions that are capable of changing everything. With the specific use of a subjective camera and a constant change from moving pictures to still images director Jean François Rouzé manages to create a maximum of empathy for his movement-blind protagonist and for the helplessness of a child being forced to learn the ways of the world anew.

Beyond that the staging of Frank’s visual impediment allows for a playful reflection on the basic principles of cinematic storytelling – on the one hand the illusion of movement within the film is deconstructed by the continual disruption of the picture flow; on the other hand the topic of the subjectivity of the perception of time is addressed when the still images are sometimes accelerated, sometimes slowed down, always according to the protagonist's mental state. “I wanted to get some order back, to control my world”, Frank explains at the beginning of the film. At the end he makes a decision against control and for the fleeting nature of a short happiness outside of any kind of order – breathlessly assembled still images shape the film's last minutes, freezing on the last still frame at the moment of the accident, which also was the first one: a shoe flying in front of a blue sky, both movement and standstill within one image.

Links

• 5 SECONDS (E 2008. Jean François Rouzé)
• Editing Puzzle – An interview with Jean François Rouzé
• A Steady Rise – Marieke Steinhoff about the Spanish film market