Mathias Poledna’s film work Version shows, completely without sound, a group of dancers moving to an unidentifiable piece of music. The camera is aimed at certain parts of the body—for instance the stomach or head area, or the moving feet—but the entire scene is never shown. Theindividual figures shift about the image, obscure each other, move apart and vanish again. Only rarely do two dancers move in the harmony of one and the same choreography. The group as a whole remains a non-homogeneous con- struct. Version, whose title is borrowed from Jamaican dancehall culture, presents a repertoire of gestures and movements that remains completely intrinsic to the picture despite all its lack of uniformity. It is not the sound that keeps the bodies’ rhythm together; it is actually the rhythm that releases a kind of mute musicality.
