Turned On

     I didn't watch a movie for an entire month.  A multitude of films to see always tickles my awareness, but I sometimes have a difficult time making a selection, as if I want to find the right movie for my intellectual mood.  All these thoughts get in the way of just watching something.
     As if to break up this ennui, I came across a film from 1926, Filmstudie, clocking in at three minutes, fifty-four seconds, directed by the Dadaist Hans Richter.  A study in geometry, the film whirls the viewers' eyes as if the watcher is stuck in a kaleidoscope.  How Richter achieved his hallucinatory effects doesn't matter to me; what matters are the associations coming about from linking one shape to the next: circles and disembodied eyeballs, the sudden appearance of a sledgehammer striking a big nailhead.  Seagulls appearing in a startling cut, the whole film a turning stew of shapes that can be broken down from the organic to the abstract/mathematical, hinting at the concept of fractals.
     Richter, like his fellow Dadaists in the first days of that movement in Zurich, was a German war veteran, wounded, finding in neutral Switzerland at the Cabaret Voltaire a new form of artistic expression--Dada, an overturning of the conventional order of things (which brought with it the world of trench warfare).
     As an example of Dada cinema, Filmstudie has no plot, no character development, just images stirred up by the simple act of the film having begun with a rising circle and ending with a lowering circle, as if we've seen a day compressed into a little under four minutes.  The multitude of eyes in the film's first part rotate about, but also peer at the audience, making the viewer into a film watched by the film.
     Overall, the film's pace of changing imagery creates an unsettling effect.  Richter evidently didn't want us to be comfortable or relaxed inside the brain-ease of logic.  The film shows us the thing under the surface holding together our perceptions.
     Google the film by its title and spend four minutes looking at something as whacked out and also refreshing as anything else in weird cinema.

                                                                                Vic Neptune 

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