Sorrows

This came to me out of the blue. I was completely unprepared for it and was thrilled. You may be too if you seek it out.

Here's why I was primed for this. I like movies. I study what makes film unique and some significant part of that is the notion of how the camera works. Its our surrogate eye, but we have no control over it. Its on tracks. Its pulled by a rope (why "Rope" is named so). So the way it behaves can be used to enforce a narrative stance.

One such is to make the camera architectural. Its less rare than you think; I've seen it in Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean for instance. But its subdued. The best architectural film I know is Welles' "Othello." But in all the cases I know, you are getting a refined eye, one carefully shot (maybe artificially) and cooked up by editors from thousands of bits.

Now this. It is strangely effective even if you don't know what it is. There's a composition of sliding planes in dance, walls and windows, environments and objects that hypnotizes. So it works by that measure. But it also works at a deeper level if you know something about it.

The building is a house of note, but not because the building itself is remarkable in its architecture. Its because some external vision endorsed it with some import. So too, our eye enters and similarly bestows. But here's the thing: everything you see was edited in the camera, composed in the eye as it was perceived. All the magic happens in the optic nerve (which is brain-like) and not the brain. Its cinema as purely visual as you can get it, never mind the vacuousness of Brakhage.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.