Lukas Marxt’s fourth film about the Salton Sea in Southern California focuses on 1944/45, when about 150 dummies, replicas of the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were dropped there for ballistic tests. “Marine Target” measures the remains of the wooden target platforms from up close and high above. The disconcerting soundtrack to this fascinating filmic study is provided by a swelling adaptation of the Nigerian hit “Atomic Bomb” by William Onyeabor.

For his monumental study of displacement, Nikolaus Geyrhalter has travelled across continents, mapping a new kind of landscape that has become detached from geographical or climatic conditions under palm trees, on mountains, at rivers, in the snow. Washed up, blown in, piled up, caught or left somewhere – where once the forces of nature were at work, garbage now dominates the shape of things. It has even brought forth a new social type: the relocator.

As in all his films, Nikolaus Geyrhalter operates the camera himself. It stands still, often for minutes, as if it couldn’t believe what presents itself: plastic webs seemingly grown together with the scrawny branches on embankments, decaying newspapers and cocoa powder packaging in the excavated soil of a potato field in Switzerland, beaches seamed at the waterline by a carpet of Styrofoam and plastic containers. In equally delicately composed images, the filmmaker focuses on the machines and people who work away at these garbage landscapes. They excavate and compact, collect and sort, sweep and rake, move one thing this way and the other that way with grapplers or hands. Well-formed and without comment, the inner workings of a self-sustaining system are revealed in which a process of alienation is underway that causes problem and solution to drift apart.

About two percent of the water on our planet covers its surface in frozen form. That is more than double the volume found in rivers, lakes and the atmosphere, the bulk of our fresh water. Global warming threatens to shift this ratio dramatically. In his latest work, Nikolaus Geyrhalter finds opulent images of a world of ice and snow, conjuring up a lively idea of the impending great melt.
From 2021 to 2025, he visited snow-covered landscapes in Japan’s north-western province of Niigata, the Swiss Aletsch Glacier, and a village in the East Tyrolean mountains. In the Inuvik region in Canada, he learns that the streets are only passable during the frost period and family celebrations can only be held then. He observes how precisely constructed snow walls attract hundreds of onlookers in Japanese Toyama, how the French ski resort of Val d’Isère tries to save itself with snow cannons while ski lifts are dismantled in Austrian Dachstein. Whether it is the Vatnajökull Glacier in Iceland, which now also melts in winter, or the German research station Neumayer III on the Ekström Ice Shelf in Antarctica – Geyrhalter meets people whose lives are shaped by the forces of nature everywhere. And they all sense that they might be the last generation to live with the beauty of ice and snow.