The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an auteurist perspective.

Total Immersion: The Films Videos of Re:Voir/USA, Part One

By Rick Curnutte

Richard A. Curnutte, Jr. is the Editor of The Film Journal. He has studied English and Film at Ohio University and The Ohio State University.

L'Ange

Watching the films and videos of the Re:Voir USA collection is a bit like closing your eyes and watching the lucidity of swirling colors that dance and cavort in the dark of that visual emptyness. Gathering together works from some of the century's most important and prolific avant-garde film and video directors, the Re:Voir USA catalog is at once perplexing, stimulating, euphoric and, ultimately, transcendent.

Here are some works that have dramatically altered my perception of what film and video art are capable of.

Stan Brakhage - Hand Painted Films (Stan Brakhage)

Brakhage, who recently passed away, was one of the most prolific and important of contemporary experimental filmmakers. His body of work is everything cinema can, and should, be. In this collection, his hand-painted films become the focus of an amazing pinnacle of the avant-garde. Brakhage has literally painted on each cell, so that every frame of his films have the breath of the creator in them. Ranging from 30 seconds to nine minutes in length, the hand-painted films are a totally immersive experience.

Often resembling the rainbow-like swirls behind tightly-closed eyes, the films in this collection exude beauty, sorrow and, often, transcendence of both painted and film art, forming a wholly original medium. Sporadically haunting and radiant, Brakhage's hand-painted films draw the viewer in until he or she is no longer viewing merely a series of repetitive, staccato images, but rather a singular, constantly thrilling canvas. Probably one of the ten or 20 most important film artists of the past several decades, Brakhage's hand-painted films are silent poems of imagery and imagination.

There's really no way to review a specific film. Whether viewed individually or en masse, the hand-painted films are a journey unto themselves. They transport the viewer into a world where anything you can imagine can be made, not just possible, but real. Brakhage allows each frame to speak for itself, as well as lending force and motion to those that come before and those that follow. You can feel the weight of what will come, just as you can feel that of what has just passed by you.

The delicately dancing images form shapes almost like turning the pages in a cartoon flip book. Stare long enough and patterns may emerge, whether real or imagined. Not unlike the Magic Eye pictures that were all the rage a few years back, the hand-painted films reveal much more between the lines than can be found within the lines themselves.

For that, if for nothing else, Brakhage deserves all the accolades he's received and more. His passing requires that we now think of him as "what was". His films allow us to see his work as "what is and always will be".

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Thanks to Fred Camper for the cover image, from Chartres Series. Fred's website can be found at www.fredcamper.com.

L'Ange (Patrick Bokanowski)

Bokanowski's cinema is one of the surreal and the beautifully absurd. L'Ange may be the most linear of the Re:Voir collections of his work, but only abstractly so. Often we will see the climax of a vignette before it happens within its given narrative construct, such as with a falling pitcher of milk. We see the pitcher shatter and the liquid rush forth, then we see its journey to that point. Scenes are played and played, from different angles and distances, giving the film's entire landscape (and soundscape, for that matter), a lurid importance.

As the film opens, a fencer jabs and throttles a hanging dolls from what seems to be scores of different positions. We see the action from down a dark hallway, as well as in the room itself. The action plays both forward and in reverse. Bokanowski is doing more here than just playing with form. In L'Ange, form itself becomes a character. Each repetition carries as much weight as the one that came before it, until a consistent flow of continuity (be it fractured and weighted dramatically) issues from the images.

The design of Bokanowski's sets manages to be outlandish and minimalist at once, somehow. Almost like lifesize dioramas of the bizarre, his sets surround and define their inhabitants, be it the fencing room, the dark dining room of the crashing pitcher, or the spare bathroom where a man bathes with what can only be described as exotic enthusiasm.

Later, we happen upon a group of sadistic-looking automatons, reading and rigorously cataloguing a decrepit library. Masked in the otherwordly, alien-like masks standard in the film, they nearly dance back and forth in their labored madness.

L'Ange is a supremely executed work of art, one of the finest films ever made, and quite possibly the pinnacle of experimentalism in the film arts.

Our coverage of the Re:Voir video catalog will continue in Issue 6. The entire Re:Voir/USA catalog is available on the web at: http://re-voir.virtual-business.com/index.html