This is one of the most unnerving experiences I've ever had in my life. Not just with movies, but in my life. I think I mean this as a compliment... I think. Certainly this gives new meaning to when we call movies 'hypnotic'. As a major fan of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and especially Eli Wallach in that film, seeing what Tscherkassky does to his performance in the film, how he moves on the screen (along with other close-ups), is so unsettling because he has taken Leone and fused it with a... bit of Stan Brakhage perhaps, as far as Cinema as Total Abstract Art Process, and mixed in a critique on cinema itself.
We're seeing this footage as part of a 'test' that a man is doing with a film projector. So in place of Ennio Morricone's score, or most of Wallach's audible dialog, we get what might be comparable to whatever the hell Lou Reed did on his Metal Machine Music album. It's industrial noises to go along with this display in 16 minutes of what happens when Tuco is practically *trapped* in his own film (we see many of those moments as he walks or rides or is stuck in a noose or, especially, as he runs through the graveyard in the climax, and for the first time there's no Ecstasy of Gold here).
I was transfixed by what this director did with this because the editing, if it is even editing at all (it carries that feel, like Brakhage of being created right before your eyes, spontaneously, like it's a true stream of consciousness effort), is so rapid-fire. It's arguably TOO rapid-fire, to the point that I'd say that if you are prone to seizures or epilepsy.... ah, screw it, you only live once, check it out and see if you can live through it, like eating a 5 pound burger in one sitting or something! But in all seriousness, this is an incredible artistic feat, while at the same time is loaded with a lot to question about the work: is it because Leone's canvas is so vast and epic, those close-ups and just Wallach in general such a key figure that it lends itself to a deconstruction of what makes movies, literally, TIC?
The fusion of black and white, frame-per-edit (or faster really) and the mess of noise that accompanies this makes for an experience that is fairly traumatic, yet I mean that as a compliment. You feel like you truly went through something seeing this.
