In Helmut Weiss' "black-and-white" film there are the motifs, substitutes and set pieces from which the myth of America can be spelled out, but as film images they pass by like shadows: Indian singing before a moonlit night, sometimes Indians with feather headdresses, a music box from the Far East and little wooden dolls form the minimalist scenario from Chinatown to Vietnam. The sound and image montages in the film are only clear in a few places, but mostly a melancholy ambivalence prevails. Acoustic refraction results in a fanning out of a minimalist visual aesthetic into mini-stories: the visual enlargement of a pictorial motif such as a few fig trees becomes a jungle, the sound montage becomes a slowed-down South State recitative, or Curtiz's Casablanca final dialogue an ironic break with the romantic associated with the men's association. An insect in a water glass, an ant circling nervously on its rim, flies on a tabletop, a hand that suddenly falls over it: in close-ups like this, the film tells what is in the subordinate clauses of detective novels. In close-up, an insect performs a surrealistic dance to the beat of the music, like the overture or epilogue to a killer showdown. The minimalist technique of enlargement thus evokes memory rather than citing what common sense holds for America. A bizarre, "black" film that lies almost vegetatively on the surface of things.