In the past, three minutes and a few extra seconds fit on the reel of a Super 8 film. So the little monologues, for which Jan Peters has positioned himself in front of his camera on his birthday every year since 1990, sometimes get abruptly cut off. The material contained a technological boundary that the subject had to adhere to. And this was exactly what the German private documentary filmmaker was looking for – he wanted to confront himself with a medium that forced him to extreme concentration, giving measure to his otherwise unspectacular self-portrayal. Between 1990 and 2019, Jan Peters celebrated his birthday thirty times with a recording. It began with the words ”This is a young men film” when he was 24 years old. He celebrated his 40th birthday with a wild dance without sound. In between, a life proceeds in fast motion with annual leaps in time. “But I still haven’t figured out the meaning of life” – this lightly made remark became the title of the sequence film, in which Jan Peters montages his birthday films until this day. They tell many stories, primarily his own, and at the same time speak of the history of the medium. As technology evolves, and, with it, new possibilities, Jan Peters is more and more interested in the past. He revisits childhood experiences and, from a piece of painted wall, evokes an entire social history of the handling of difficult children in the Federal Republic of Germany. In his journal films “November, 1-30” (1998) and “December, 1-31” (1999), Jan Peters had already tested the method of structured self-picturization, thereby finding a limbo between disarming sincerity and sovereign (under-) staging. The figure in the background is “the grand Master Hans Lucas” aka Jean-Luc Godard, who ascribed a content of truth to the cinematic image, twenty-four times a second, including the pauses between the pictures. Jan Peters is able to encompass “the whole complex of being, the unanswered questions” with ease. The film is just one and a half hours long. Video is being used as a makeshift in between. But since 2000, even Jan Peters has no longer wanted to resist digitalization. […]