Hermann Wallner’s everyday “world view” is a panorama of the surrounding landscape framed in metal girders. Although his freedom of motions is restricted to a few movements of the hand, his precision work is monumental in scale. Small lapses of concentration, such as at the beginning of the film when we hear a seemingly incidental radioed instruction coming from the off of this “world view”, Wallner dare not allow himself: “Swing to the left, please…ah, to the right…sorry…” Hermann Wallner operates a crane ­ although he really wanted to become a bulldozer driver. This, together with a few other shreds of information recounted by Wallner himself, is all the story Alexander Binder and Stefan Hafner need to complement this “conception of the world” impressively drawn from the bird cage perspective. In a few painstakingly arranged shots Binder and Hafner sketch the co-ordinates of a crane driver’s field of vision and movement. Tilts and pans accurately aligned on metal girders; the view from above divided by metal struts; unobtrusive views into the operator’s cabin. The sparse but at the same time efficient images would tend to give the impression of a brazen mechanical loftiness ­ were it not for Wallner’s voice in the off as an irretrievable human counterpoint. Wallner’s short account of an incident when the crane toppled over (with him still in the cabin) is enough for Binder and Hafner, with a wink in our direction, to cause the seemingly solid structure to waver. (Robert Buchschwenter)