A lonesome car. The wind is whistling. A door of an undefined building opens—is it a holiday bungalow, a shed or a ruin? A woman is standing at the window. The heat of an idle day of holiday, perhaps. The South, a place of longing.

Christian Petzold’s predilection for genre is apparent even in his earliest, self-funded works. This quasi-documentary sketch finds abandoned books by Jim Thompson and James M. Cain flapping in the breeze. An abstract, 8mm study in montage, it remains Petzold’s most radical experiment in form.