WELCOME TO THE ETHER
Whenever binocular vision is depicted in cinema as two circles joined in the middle, you are being told an optical lie. The two eyes are but lenses through which the mind sees together but one image. When you look through binoculars, the mind sees not two circles but one.
And so the circular, telescopic vision of The Forgotten Colours of Dreams produces a forceful distancing effect disembodying the viewer from all the material sense data being…
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k_8e6QIS3o
This 1991 short cemented Andersson’s conversion away from realism and marked the path to his Living Trilogy. Its Swedish title “Härlig är jorden” comes from a Christian hymn and translates as “Lovely Is the Earth.” Epitomizing the life of a tall, mustachioed, professional-class Swedish man, an estate agent, the film compresses all that needs to be said in 15 brief scenes — carefully composed images statically captured and arranged in a parabolic structure.
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1) Holocaust truck, the screaming…
Oh, Kelemen has down Tarr’s aesthetics of duration, all right. He holds the viewer’s interest with aplomb, subbing in East German plains for the Hungarian steppe. And this movie’s in color, by the way, something I had no idea of going in. It’s a dark, muted, ugly color, but reds, yellows, and blues are all put to meaningful use.
Largely, this is sculpting in time after the tradition of Tarkovsky, by way of Tarr. Those long, powerful dreams one has,…
The question Sleeping Man asks is — “Is a man something big or something small?” Everything that he perceives, after all, is contained within his perception, within his experience. The world as we know it is within us. That makes us quite big, yet in the world we perceive within us, we are very small within it.
As one character passes, his soul is carried up by a whirlwind. His size extends to the limits of the cosmos. He is…
TRACK LISTING
1. Deaf/Punk (1979), by Richard Gaikowski [0:00:13–0:07:11]
2. In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution (1976), by Chuck Statler [0:07:12–0:17:05]
3. The Residents: The Third Reich ’n Roll (1977), by The Residents [0:17:06–0:21:52]
4. Hello Skinny (1979), by Graeme Whifler [0:21:53–0:24:53]
5. One Minute Movies (1980), by Graeme Whifler [0:24:54–0:29:44]
— Moisture [0:25:18–0:26:21]
— Act of Being Polite [0:26:22–0:27:24]
— Perfect Love [0:27:25–0:28:28]
— The Simple Song [0:28:29–0:29:31]
6. MX-80: Why Are We Here? (1981),…
There’s a way that I respect Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, despite its hateful content, in that it knows what it wants to do, and it does it. I have specific morals, on account of which I wouldn’t be able to watch anything if I insisted films conform to my values of good and evil. But a film’s own internal values must meet a level of self-coherence to command respect. I can muster no such respect for D.W.…
