Die Zeit als Gegenstand eines Films ist ein unmögliches Unterfangen. Aber Hartmanns ebenso schlaue wie witzige, analytische wie spekulative Herangehensweise erfindet Wege und Bilder, Argumente und Anmutungen, die von der Zeit erzählen. So erzählen, als wäre sie ein seltsames Tier, ein Lufthauch, ein Raum, ein Gedicht. DIE ZEIT VERGEHT WIE EIN BRÜLLENDER LÖWE – eine Behauptung, die von der Großmutter des Filmemachers stammt – ist ein höchst vergnüglicher, lehrreicher, fantastischer und am Ende doch möglicher Essay über das Unmögliche. Ein Edelstein unter den diesjährigen Viennale-Filmen.

Viennale 2013 ( http://www.viennale.at/de/film/zeit-vergeht-wie-ein-bruellender-loewe )

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Philipp Hartmann’s film Time Goes by Like a Roaring Lion (Die Zeit Vergeht wie ein Brüllender Löwe), named for a curious turn of phrase used by the filmmaker’s grandmother, grasps for the more intangible phenomenon of temporality itself. Compendious, deadpan, and unabashedly personal, the film concerns a 38 and a-quarter year-old filmmaker in the middle of his life expectancy, whose fear of passing time leads him on a transcontinental investigation. The blindingly white Bolivian salt flats, the atomic clock in Braunschweig, the hourglass collection of the widow of a clockmaker in Buenos Aires, a train graveyard in the Andes (where, according to some graffiti, “the only thing that happens here is time”): Hartmann’s film explores memory and time’s many facets in ways both topical (concerns about child development and the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease) and formal (cinema’s function of marking time through objects and motion). Most of all, Hartmann’s film makes the abstract intimate—through conversations with friends, his mother’s diary entries, and a dream about his father, and through an unflinching process of self-documentation, family photos, and the slow accumulation of little objects on his desk. And the film itself functions as just such an accumulation of styles, narratives, and insights, following philosophical tangents, playing games of perspective, and dipping into fictional episodes and witty reconstructions.

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Leo Goldsmith in: „RECORDS, REMNANTS, AND RUINS – Highlights from Doclisboa 2013“ in The Brooklyn Rail.

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2013/12/film/records-remnants-and-ruins-highlights-from-doclisboa-2013

Entrevista por Roger Koza para El Cinematógrafo, Canal 10, Córdoba AR:

http://ojosabiertos.otroscines.com/el-cinematografo-2013-11-p3ndejo5-y-encuentro-con-philipp-hartmann/

Entrevista por Roger Koza para el blog Con los Ojos Abiertos:

http://ojosabiertos.otroscines.com/lo-unico-que-pasa-una-conversacion-con-philipp-hartmann/

Time is one of the most fascinating things to think about. Of course, it’s not a thing at all—we call it a dimension. Are there any better Wikipedia entries than those for “time” and “circadian rhythm”?

Director Philipp Hartmann puts his chronophobia to fascinating and occasionally funny use in this very German essay motivated by a very common anxiety: fear of the passing of time. His continent-hopping journey is poetic and evocative by turns. We move from the atomic clock in Braunschweig (which “exports time” to other European countries) to the amazing planes of the largest salt desert in the world, lying at 4000m in Bolivia. Hartmann is interested in unusual experiences of time—including a fascinating section regarding a test for Alzheimer’s—but mostly this is a film about the quotidian, about how the mind registers and is unsettled by being in it, with, of course, a few surprises along the way.

“A filmic philosophical essay often poses a challenge: how to film an idea? Often, talking about a particular matter is confused with materializing it in front of the camera. That’s why Philipp Hartman uses no intellectual stars to explain the philosophical dimension of time and rather attempts to present some sort of phenomenology of time through his camera and his own immediate experience.“ (Roger Koza, FICUNAM)

(Vancouver International Filmfestival 2013)