05 August 2004
I Dream a Surrealist Cinema
Just been drinking tea with Glueboot. And, indeed, watching her filmic output (not religious porn, sadly)- but, rather, a brief avant-garde-y feature from 2003 entitled, erm, 'Glueboot'(the blog named in honour of the film). I told her I'd write a little review of it so, cough, cough, here goes:
'Glueboot', directed and edited by Siobhan McKeown, is a subtle and contemporary take on the noble (or, rather, openly anti-noble) history of Surrealist filmaking. Splicing colour footage of seemingly banal occurrences (a pigeon scrabbling about, rubbish bins stuffed with McDonalds junk, motorways - or perhaps autobahns?, even a Morrisons) with oneiric, sepia-tinged, high-drama sequences on beaches and in ruins (the odd murder, desired breasts, sleeping women, the burial of a be-suited man in sand, the removal of a young lady's hand with a meat cleaver), the film plays on the discontinuous nature of waking (and sleeping) imaginings, sentiments and history. This stylistic juxtaposition forces us to ask which is 'more surreal': The 'classically' psychoanalytic beach and ruin images, replete with violence, sex and art, or the demented repetition of what could be Ballard's own surrealist territory (the purring brutality of the automobile, the gorged trash receptacle, the over-flowing quantities of junk food for junk animals, etc.)?
Much of the film is over-layered with a dispersive narrative tale....this is literally 'glue', a nonsensical stream of dream-words and aesthetic observations, which appear, occasionally coupled with the odd textual stream smattered across the footage, in the sepia sections of the film (and only the sepia sections). Do signs thus belong purely to history? To our dream-image of history (the history that wears a moustache and a monocle and takes picnics by the seaside?!). Supermarkets dream an alphabet without a code.
In an aural replica of the colour-movement-image splicing technique of the visual elements of the film, the soundtrack performs the neat trick of reversing Mendelssohn all the way back to Aphex Twin (and, again, you ask yourself, who is the true classicist...).
'Glueboot' ultimately manages to fuse intelligent commentary on a filmic 'tradition' that fights with bloodied horrorist claw against its own categorisation with a surrealist lexography of its own (the demented psychogeography of modern speeds and slownesses).
If all goes according to plan, it will be screened in all major cinemas as a short feature before the next Harry Potter film.
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Hope you like the review, S! I tried to do it in my best film studies style. When I make my own feature, I will allow you to be the first to compare it to Vertov and Tarkovsky.
