Thursday the 3rd I went to the Union Theatre and saw Zoopraxia by Karl Keels. The first film was an experimental of a Rhino going in and out of the doors of his cage. The editing was really fast and made the film appear to have a epileptic pulse. There was repeated shots of the same door opening and closing, the pace and editing of this varied almost each time it was shown. I liked this particular film because of it's "trippy" look, a sort of spectacle. The second was of three hippos confined in a Zoo's living space. They obviously had a limited space to move, only maneuvering themselves in and out of the door, into their water pond, and laying on the patio between the water and the door. Their lives fit in a single frame. It was depressing, with a few comedic breaks. I'm not sure if a hippo can look happy at all, but these hippos were sad for sure. They looked lifeless. And we watched the process of the zoo workers painting the walls to make it looks better, newer, more cheerful than the gray torn stone it had been before. Then after all that the hippo goes and shits over everything on the nice new white walls, as if he were saying "Listen guys, you can paint these as pretty as you want, we're still miserable bastards and we hate you."
From a cinematographic point of view, I loved the geometrics of the objects within the frame. The camera was aligned so that the doors always seemed to appear in the same spot. The rectangle shapes of the doors, the rectangles on the walls, the stairs where the pond fills, the ladders of the painting crew in the shape of triangles...
The next film was my favorite, short and sweet and mysterious. It started out a pulsating white blob behind a swarm of tiny black dots swirling and falling and moving gracefully. You could see that there was some kind of picture behind it. The white grew and grew and grew then BAM. You can see the picture that had been hiding in the background and the black dots continue to fly and swarm, teasing the audience with its mystery. I thought that maybe we would find out what they black dot swarm was, since the other figures had been unveiled, but it never became clear.
The last film, "Sidewalks", left me bored to tears after the first 15 minutes. After that I kept guessing "Where is this going to go now, what is going to happen now?" And the answer was always - nothing." Sometimes I thought that maybe some of the people were set up to do certain things, but then I realized no because if that were the case then this wouldn't be so boring.
