25th of April, 2020
This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic. I was reviewing Ere Erera Baleibu Izik Subua Aruaren, a film by José Antonio Sistiaga.
If film is about movement, then this one is the most filmy film of them all because it moves more than all the others. Every single frame of this film has some sort of speckling on it, which means that as the frames flick by rapidly it produces a sumptuous visual effect that I've only ever seen before in TV static. Focusing ones gaze on a region in the frame, the speckles will appear to spin wildly around that region, and that is true anywhere one looks in the image. The eye naturally identifies some area of interest, and in the case of this film that will inevitably be a blob of colour. This blob of colour exists physically as a stain on a piece of plastic in the film roll, and as soon as the eye picks up on it the frame changes and this particular blob becomes buried in the roll of film that has already passed by, gone forever. Not to be deterred, the human brain cleverly scans for a similar looking blob and finds it near where the original was, but not in exactly the same place. Every time the frame changes and the brain locks on to the nearest blob, the attention is led in a quick rotation around the chosen area of interest in the frame. I have never seen a composed piece of art do something quite like this before. The image swirls in both directions at once, and it does it everywhere. It's an amazing visual effect.
On top of that spinning, the film also involves the sort of motion that is more familiar to abstract film, the large macroscopic structures of colour that are superimposed on the isotropic speckling. These structures too move, but much more slowly. As different sizes of blob move around at different speeds, the effect is almost contrapuntal. Underpinning all of this is the glacial movement between different visual styles, with minutes long stretches dominated by certain colour combinations or compositional styles which evolve elegantly and organically over the course of the entire film. The mechanical complexity is tempered with a poetic softness in that every individual image is made up of shapes that, while abstract, are naturalistic, biological and warm.