|
Texas-born Toronto-based director Blake Williams (USA, 1985)
3D shorts
Coorow-Latham Road (2011),
Many a Swan (2012), Baby Blue (2013), Red Capriccio (2014) and Something Horizontal (2015),
using a technique inspired by Michael Snow rather then
Norman McLaren’s Now is the Time (1951) and Around Is Around (1951).
Williams' 3D experiments were contemporary with
Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010),
Ken Jacobs’s Seeking the Monkey King (2011),
Godard’s Goodbye to Language (2014), Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016) and
Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018).
The 63-minute immersive stereoscopic 3D-film Prototype (2017) employed
polarized 3D instead of the anaglyph 3D of the shorts.
It feels like a hypnotic journey into the nature of cinema itself.
The film opens with dual images of Galveston in 1900 after the hurricane that
devastated the town.
We then see giant slow-motion waves viewed from the sky while we hear distorted psychedelic electronic music. As the color shifts to black, they create the impression of sparkling stars in the night sky and then of sinister clouds before returning to their natural shapes.
Root-like black lines populate flickering elongated screens that later function like portholes, allowing us to view people walking around like ghosts, while we hear thunder amid electronic buzz.
The collage of brief videos of both people, animals and nature is
combined with still images of the town's buildings and life while the
droning glitchy music is occasionally pierced by thunder.
At the 27-minute mark a new section begins, titled "Some weeks later".
We see someone driving on a highway and then the images become even more surreal:
we see objects flying in the sky, losing their identities, liquefying.
The portholes assume irregular shapes, then rectangular ones.
The flickering effect damages images in a more brutal way.
The ghostly atmosphere becomes even more otherworldly, as loops swirl at an
increasingly manic speed. It's a psychological tour de force.
It takes a while to return to images of waves.
The screen goes black for a few seconds. Then we watch a calm sea.
(Copyright © 2024 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
|
