I just saw the 2 p.m. program (Onion City). (How can a festival be reviewed before it occurs?) Well-attended, and a real space . . I mean, not a screening room or theater!
Never having seen anything by Hamlyn, and not thinking about who made what as they came up, it occurred to me that this particular film was probably by someone who might have written a book on, let's call it structuralist work, without getting too worried about what that might mean. But, but . . I watched innocently. And watched it in the context of a program of very diverse work. Strange to think, is it European to be faced with the wait - again - I mean the patience required by 16 mm work, silent work, even if there was this wonderful noise initially, before the sound was corrected? Isn't that the patience of the principled live action, and in Europe? The first minute, the first shot, and we have to interpret, is this all photographic (like, the whole picture, without artifice, without a layer that is graphic, for example), or is it somehow the introduction of a graphic line, or lines, into a photographically real time-lapse shot? The color at the end would be what the rule or the proposition requires, but the experience, on this occasion by this observer, included a saddening . . the graduate loss of the joy experienced in the film's earlier purity, its black and white, soft motion, choppy change . . like a Brothers Quay artifact trembling in the space of solid stillness. I thought of the portrait project, of the examination of a space (we know this from the empty old house film, for example). At least the spouting water was initially unrelated to the crane and ironwork, only later recognized to be part of the same object, the same architectural thing. The film gradually allowed for greater depth, for a shift in one's capacity to see material as spatial rather than graphic. And the color was introduced only cautiously, first with the yellow vest of a worker, and a yellow that could as well pass for a tinting or a particular black and white stock (I've received very beautiful black and white prints, and also just straightforward black and white prints, of the very same subject, lighting, the very same concept, you might say). The color was opened up with full force only in the final shot, and here it was received with a kind of mourning, a regret to be given reality . . reality "as such." Bernie
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