Minute 56

 Minute 56 (by Paula Rieth)

When I watched Minute 56 for the first time, I did not really know what to do with it, seeing as it was just damaged film. I wondered about what had used to be visible in this lost minute, and whether there was any way to recover what was lost. But whilst asking myself these questions, I wondered why I would even want to do that: What would I be able to do with it? I thought about it some more and asked myself whether the original video might have been only truly meaningful to the person who made it. I did not reach a conclusive answer, but I did feel oddly melancholic and sad about the fleetingness of time, and about how something that could mean the world to one person could be utterly meaningless when that person was gone. I thought about how hard it was to hold on to something, and about how nothing really mattered in the end if no one would remember a hundred years from now, and that that was just the way of the world; there was no stopping that. So I wrote down my thoughts in short stanzas and then rearranged them so the outcome would be a mostly coherent poem. I had read a bunch of existentialist books and essays in the months prior, so that is probably where the tone of meaninglessness in the poem come from, but I actually did not intend for it to be about hopelessness. I wanted it to be about not holding back anymore, about being an appeal to live without fear or shame.