Flickerama

While I appreciated this short, it seems to me that filmmakers have been expressing memory and heightening perception of the seemingly everyday via flickering images for a very long time, typically grainy ones, set against the sun and given various tints in post. Although it still has impact, it's not a fresh approach and I'm a little tired of it. I'd like to see these experiences expressed in a different mode.

Sometimes I think the approach is a little too easy, and that it might be a flashy cover for relatively uninspired images - in the same way that hyper-editing in the manner of The Bourne Ultimatum can cover flaws. There is indeed a painful beauty in the everyday little things, and not to say that I didn't experience this in Ashes, for which I am grateful. But the method was on my mind, and became a distraction. I prefer the long takes of Weerasethakul's features, which also convey the same impression of memory and awareness of something imminent in the everyday present, but without the well-worn strategy of flickering glimpses.

For me the familiar nature of this approach was compensated by Weerasethakul's typically evocative use of sound. That transported me into his world more than the images alone, partly because of the familiar way the images were presented.

The best part for me was the man talking about his dream-within-a-dream. In a dream, facing away from a dream of his home town, and looking over his shoulder to draw it, worried that the colours would fade and he would forget. That audio was so strong I don't think Weerasethakul was able to match it to images. Just a couple of black and white glimpses of men, or one man. So he kept the screen dark. That worked with the idea of fading colour, but it's also a testament to the fact that what we hear often has more impact than what we see. It's actually very complex: we create the image of the man's dream-within-a-dream - him drawing, and also the dream he's drawing - at the same time we're creating an image of him telling this story, in particular how he might be showing how he feels as he tells it. Sound is more primal than image. Our brains conceive from sound faster than from light.


"You must not judge what I know by what I find words for." - Marilynne Robinson