• Home
  • Reviews
    • All Reviews
    • Theatrical Release
    • Video-On-Demand
    • Home Video
  • Features
    • All Features
    • Exposition
    • One Year Later
    • Career View
    • Encore!
    • Departures
    • Forgotbusters
    • Laser Age
    • Movie Of The Week
    • Performance Review
    • You Might Also Like?
  • Newsreel
  • Essential
  • Podcast
  • The Writers

The Dissolve

  • Reviews
  • Features
  • Newsreel
  • Essential
  • Podcast
  • 0
  • 0

September 18, 2013 features / Short Cuts

Art meets science and industry in this week’s shorts “Energie!”

Art meets science and industry in this week’s shorts

by Noel Murray

Every week, Short Cuts reviews one newer and one older film from the wide world of short cinema, from the extremes of the avant-garde to the cultural ephemera of industrial films.

“Energie!” (dir. Thorsten Fleisch, 2007, 5:08)

In an interview with the Gaspar Noé fansite Le Temps Detruit Tout, German experimental filmmaker Thorsten Fleisch described the way he works: “It is a very procedural approach, meaning that I normally don’t know where it will lead me in the end. I just try to find what I think looks interesting and beautiful, and then when I have experimented enough, I try to put the different results together in a way that makes sense to me.” For his multiple-award-winning 2007 short “Energie!”, Fleisch transformed his fascination with tesla coils into a Stan Brakhage-style animated artwork, exposing photographic paper to high voltage and then arranging these “electrophotographies” into a kind of flipbook. A tinkerer by nature, Fleisch uses “Energie!” to show how awe-inspiring raw electricity can be, and how impressive the manipulation of those forces can be. It’s an experiment about experimenting.

In the same interview with Le Temps Detruit Tout, Fleisch said that along with the avant-garde masters, he likes horror and science-fiction filmmakers like Dario Argento, David Cronenberg, and Tobe Hooper. (“I think these genres are the most interesting and experimental visually.”) He carried that cross-discipline curiosity into his collaboration with Noé on the flickery title sequence to the French director’s hallucinogenic 2009 fantasy Enter The Void. Even “Energie!” has some of the qualities of darkly psychedelic science-fiction, with the film’s rapid succession of electrical charges resembling trees on a distant planet, or a microscopic journey through the synapses of the brain. It’s an exciting and unsettling adventure, with Jens Thiele’s droning soundtrack setting a tone of alienness. But it’s also a visually pleasing film, for all its freneticism. Freeze-frame anywhere, at any time, and the picture is striking—like the first images being sent back from a rover into the unknown.

 

“Mechanical Principles” (dir. Ralph Steiner, 1930, 10:35)

Photographer Ralph Steiner studied science in college before migrating to the fine arts in the 1920s and then progressive politics and avant-garde cinema in the 1930s, but he never lost his fascination with chemistry, geometry, and engineering. He applied all three of those disciplines to his photos and his films, which openly employ technology while also sometimes spotlighting it. Steiner’s 1930 short “Mechanical Principles” is a study of machines in motion, cut to the rhythm of the machines themselves. It’s all angles and curves, with metal parts turning and compressing with precision, looking almost like animated schematics. Unlike the majority of the “factory films” that followed—mostly industrial films and instructional pieces of the How It’s Made variety—“Mechanical Principles” never shows the results of any of this grinding and clanking. The machines are shown in segments, as pieces of a whole that the audience never gets to see. The joy of the film is in the movement itself, so balletic, yet so predictable. The parts are like dancers who always hit their marks.

  1. Most Read Features

    1. loading
  2. Most Recent Features

    1. The human nature of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man
    2. Why Tangerine could be a turning point for transgender actors
    3. Female pleasure looks mighty odd in Magic Mike XXL
    4. Penelope Spheeris on the long-overdue return of her Decline Of Western Civilization trilogy
    5. Forum: The Killer
  3. Latest From
    Short Cuts

    1. Two short films explore the sounds and sights of the city
    2. Adventures in stop-motion
    3. Christmas-themed shorts portray today’s needy and yesteryear’s mall
    4. Two shorts find Christmas trees as the subjects and perpetrators of holiday violence
    5. Two oddball shorts have separate ideas about what people most need from each other
Top
comments powered by Disqus

Comments Policy

The Dissolve

  • Reviews
    • Theatrical Release
    • Video-On-Demand
    • Home Video
    • 4+ Star Reviews
  • Features
  • News
  • Essential
  • More Info

    • RSS
    • Comments
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Advertising
    • Writers
    • Contact
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Tumblr

Tweets

The Dissolve @thedissolve

© 2022 Pitchfork Media Inc.
All rights reserved.