Other viewers may seek out gripping storytelling, beautiful photography, or the flowery cornucopias that come from good thespians and a good scribe. These can be potent in good hands, or if the craft is applied in exciting ways. But for me this is my bread and butter, images from the emptiness that generates worlds.
I have seen a few of this man's films and consider him one of the most talented voices to emerge in the past 10 years. I get from him what I used to be able to get from Herzog, the journey to the precipice outside the familiar maps where cosmogenic forces pour into the world and constantly destroy and renew. The journey is usually attended by dissicated ruins, by visions of a human madness that purifies. But what I had seen so far was short and I was eagerly expecting something heftier to evaluate. Structure is after all one of the biggest challenges a filmmaker is called to solve, how to sustain a concentrated practice.
This is again about post-apocalyptic utopias. We learn that consecutive cataclysms have left afloat only a system of islands, we visit four of these as exemplary utopias selected for an encyclopedia. Different narrators quote from the curator of the encyclopedia. So a twice removed ethnographic document with a set of images attached, once more removed because it's fictional, a frame like Chris Marker used to embellish from.
A quick run-through of the four segments, because this is the first review posted here.
The first is about an island society observing a universe nightbound and only illuminated by the light of reason and science. They harness electricity from the elements into seeing, with stellar reflections from the farthest reaches cast below in a pond of noesis. The biggest danger faced by these stargazers is that with their head in the clouds, they are confounded by the chasms and crevices of the earthly world they tread on. Images are clean, volcanic, natural.
The second is about a culture evolved from storytelling, powered by narrators and the imagination. The place is teeming with shipwrecked remnants of life and wild fauna, the images are like from the south Asian tropics after a devastating storm with debris everywhere and pigs scampering among them. The curator reports this is not an ideal utopia, because the inhabitants are always restless enough to imagine better worlds.
The third is an island of decaying concrete architecture surrounded by a sea wall. There is no mention of inhabitants or architects, except a mad founder whose message led to the discovery. Desolation is seeping from the sockets of empty windows, images are stark, industrial. We are ghostly visitors here among pallid ruins of urban civilization falling apart, ruins on top of ruins.
(the deserted island is Hashima, a coal mining settlement off the coast of Nagasaki, and is an amazing sight of the dramatic industrialization that took place in Japan).
The last one is situated around Somerset, a primitive forest society driven by the flair and revolution of youth and tribal myth and violence. At age 42, men and women plunge themselves in battle to kill or be killed. The penitent figures are masked and half-naked, sackcloth or cardboard designs stitched with narrow slits or a bulging eye that communicate mute baleful horror. It ends with the image of a masked warrior greeting an orange sun and a call to arms.
So a feature-length Ben Rivers, or close to it. The essayist structure adopted from Marker is generally put to disappointing use. It is like four shorts stitched together, and only incidental that we watch them consecutively. No greater insight emerges. As it turns out it is exactly that, four 16mm works brought together for the purposes of an exhibition.
But once again the images alone exhilarate, the eye for discovery. The faint residues of nameless violence and mystery. The hidden fabrics of the world revealed with raw material. The tangible poetry.
This man's obsessions are easy to identify; ruins, dissipation, the mechanisms that shape worlds. Sift among his recollections, shed whatever self is keeping you from the ritual, and pick what reflects your own nightbound universe.
I have seen a few of this man's films and consider him one of the most talented voices to emerge in the past 10 years. I get from him what I used to be able to get from Herzog, the journey to the precipice outside the familiar maps where cosmogenic forces pour into the world and constantly destroy and renew. The journey is usually attended by dissicated ruins, by visions of a human madness that purifies. But what I had seen so far was short and I was eagerly expecting something heftier to evaluate. Structure is after all one of the biggest challenges a filmmaker is called to solve, how to sustain a concentrated practice.
This is again about post-apocalyptic utopias. We learn that consecutive cataclysms have left afloat only a system of islands, we visit four of these as exemplary utopias selected for an encyclopedia. Different narrators quote from the curator of the encyclopedia. So a twice removed ethnographic document with a set of images attached, once more removed because it's fictional, a frame like Chris Marker used to embellish from.
A quick run-through of the four segments, because this is the first review posted here.
The first is about an island society observing a universe nightbound and only illuminated by the light of reason and science. They harness electricity from the elements into seeing, with stellar reflections from the farthest reaches cast below in a pond of noesis. The biggest danger faced by these stargazers is that with their head in the clouds, they are confounded by the chasms and crevices of the earthly world they tread on. Images are clean, volcanic, natural.
The second is about a culture evolved from storytelling, powered by narrators and the imagination. The place is teeming with shipwrecked remnants of life and wild fauna, the images are like from the south Asian tropics after a devastating storm with debris everywhere and pigs scampering among them. The curator reports this is not an ideal utopia, because the inhabitants are always restless enough to imagine better worlds.
The third is an island of decaying concrete architecture surrounded by a sea wall. There is no mention of inhabitants or architects, except a mad founder whose message led to the discovery. Desolation is seeping from the sockets of empty windows, images are stark, industrial. We are ghostly visitors here among pallid ruins of urban civilization falling apart, ruins on top of ruins.
(the deserted island is Hashima, a coal mining settlement off the coast of Nagasaki, and is an amazing sight of the dramatic industrialization that took place in Japan).
The last one is situated around Somerset, a primitive forest society driven by the flair and revolution of youth and tribal myth and violence. At age 42, men and women plunge themselves in battle to kill or be killed. The penitent figures are masked and half-naked, sackcloth or cardboard designs stitched with narrow slits or a bulging eye that communicate mute baleful horror. It ends with the image of a masked warrior greeting an orange sun and a call to arms.
So a feature-length Ben Rivers, or close to it. The essayist structure adopted from Marker is generally put to disappointing use. It is like four shorts stitched together, and only incidental that we watch them consecutively. No greater insight emerges. As it turns out it is exactly that, four 16mm works brought together for the purposes of an exhibition.
But once again the images alone exhilarate, the eye for discovery. The faint residues of nameless violence and mystery. The hidden fabrics of the world revealed with raw material. The tangible poetry.
This man's obsessions are easy to identify; ruins, dissipation, the mechanisms that shape worlds. Sift among his recollections, shed whatever self is keeping you from the ritual, and pick what reflects your own nightbound universe.
