Wavelengths Preview 1
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Writing about avant-garde films cold -- that is, without the benefit of artist's statements or technical explanations of technique -- is a tricky business. I'm still new to it myself, but I believe that 90% of the critic's job in this situation is simply to describe, as accurately as possible, what he or she sees, and that is my single ambition for this series of previews of a handful of films that will play next month in the Wavelengths program at the Toronto International Film Festival. I've sworn to not read Michael Sicinski's responses until after I've written my own, but that shouldn't stop you.
Lumphini 2552 (Tomonari Nishikawa)
Tomonari Nishikawa's Lumphini 2552 is constructed from still black-and-white photos (2,552 of them?) of dense growths of plants and trees. The images fly by quickly -- 12 per second, I'd guess -- which turns them into high-contrast abstraction and allows Nishikawa to carefully modulate the rhythms of the film. In the opening seconds, he cuts repeatedly from long shots to close-ups, mimicking the effect of time-lapse photography. Later, he alternates between compositions of vertical and horizontal lines, which, like Muybridge's horses, creates the tense illusion of movement. Shots of shaded stems are a palette of blacks; low-angle views into the treetops are whites. And the whole thing resolves perfectly into darkness, like a breath. It's a sublime kaleidoscope, I'll tell you, and a damn fine way to spend three minutes.
My tendency when describing a film like Lumphini 2552 is to fall back on Modernist rallying cries like that old Ezra Pound chestnut, "Make it new!" Maybe a useful way to think of Nishikawa's film is as a beautifully defamiliarized -- and uniquely cinematic -- landscape. In that sense it reminds me of the few Brackhage collages I've seen -- films like The Garden of Earthly Delights and Mothlight.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
« Home