Jan 4, 2019
(3 is a good score more, see my profile)
I am very comfortable rating this higher than both Fullmetal Alchemist and Samurai Champloo.
The clue is in the name people: Rhythm. Yesterday, the 3rd of January, was my Birthday, after unfortunately getting up at 5am to go to work I decided to spend the rest of it with my family exercising my identity as an avant-weeaboo. While in a really very good Japanese restaurant I told to my Mum why I think Haiku is a symbol of the insidious influence of Western capitalist jingoism on Japanese (nationalist) culture and why I don't often care for overly literary
...
films. I think I remember vaguely alluding to the first point pretty well in my recent Ponyo review so here I will vaguely allude to the second one.
"At Darmstadt I was talking about the reason back of pulverization and fragmentation: for instance, using syllables instead of words in a vocal text, letters instead of syllables. I said, “We take things apart in order that they may become the Buddha. And if that seems too Oriental an idea for you,” I said, “Remember the early Christian Gnostic statement, 'Split the stick and there is Jesus!’ ”"
- John Cage, Indeterminacy 1959
John Cage by this means that we take an art down to its syllables: sounds that have no meaning - and then from there we may choose to build them back into words, which do have meaning, or we may choose to do something quite different with them. We may indeed choose to build a kind of mechanism, something which does not mean anything but whirrs and wiggles in its way and ends up resembling nothing but what it is, which may be very beautiful. I'm not entirely sure what the syllables of a film are: it may be frames, but they are essentially just paintings or photographs. It may be Time, according to my other aesthetic hero Andrei Tarkovsky. If it is that wholly abstract thing, time, then our brains might need to get a grip on it via its handholds, the rhythm of a shot. In any moving picture there will be some degree of churning, the bits and pieces probably have some kind of direction, a cardinal direction that is. They move from some region of the screen to another, or from an imaginary point off screen to an different imaginary point off screen, and happen to pass through the part we can see.
This film consists of nothing but bits and pieces moving in a direction, and though it is only two minutes long and truth be told not exactly good enough to totally warrant this spiel I have written, I think it is a good example of "something quite different" built from the syllables of film.
Review Epilogue:
This film has a really neat soundtrack. It's an electronic offering by a man/entity known only to me as POL. If you have any information about this man/entity then please message me about them.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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