One and Many Films

Phase Shifting Index (2020) by Jeremy Shaw is a seven-monitor projection that carries at least as many sound sources, all of it depicting fictive, though vaguely familiar movement-based groups designed to pass for past, present and future entities, as carried in a range of old and new media. Too much of everything happens for about thirty minutes, until it becomes apparent that the groups' movements have started to speed up, and in doing so align -- both visually and in its suddenly shared soundtrack. Once aligned, the picture images further unify in an eruption of bright colours, where parts emerge from other parts, eventually ending with what looks like a neurological field map.

As someone who tired quickly of drugs or dance clubs, I get it but no longer feel it. Nor do I care for it. If our current anxiety is expected to accelerate before it's suppose to get better, I'll take my last pill now. I have seen the future, and it is Jeremy's past and present obsessions. An amazing work, currently at the Polygon Gallery. Today's the last day. Go see it!

The other moving thing I watched yesterday was from my current pile of VPL DVDs, and that was Terrance Malick's Song to Song (2017). I loved Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), and both appreciated his nineteen year hiatus from filmmaking ("There is something to be said about not making a movie") and the film that ended it, The Thin Red Line (1997). But The New World (2005) left me cold in the way some critics accuse all his films of being -- cold as in "artificial." The Tree of Life (2011) had some moments I connected with, moments delivered poetically through language and image. Song to Song even more so, I think, despite its excesses. Could he not make his film ever less than what they are? 

Here is Faye speaking:

I went through a period when sex had to be violent. I was desperate to feel something real. Nothing felt real. Every kiss felt like half of what it should be. You’re just reaching for air. 

And here too:

I thought we could just roll and tumble. Live from song to song. Kiss to kiss.