Daniel Kasman on "LETTER" By my first afternoon in Rotterdam I had found an image that positively vibrated out of the screen at me. A dark doorway, seen obliquely in an empty frame, contained by stolid, lifeless rural architecture, cloaked in a miasma conjured from a combination of haze, a fogged lens, old film stock, and blown out whites from an open aperture. It is from Letter, a short work, not so much a documentary but a fragment drawn carefully and gently into immanence by Sergei Loznitsa, conjured from footage he shot, the program notes tell me, over ten years ago “at a psychiatric institution in a forgotten corner of Russia.” But even with no text or voice over to place and set this artifact resurrected (or projected), and a soundtrack achingly follied and sneakily dubbed, the sense of lostness, malady and asynchronicity is prevalent. Some persons, mostly old and bumbling, pursue the frame with varied purpose and activity abstracted from any life or livelihood, brief social interactions with and within the image, while others seem forever settled in it. The landscapes and buildings, like that which houses the dark doorway, are not so much inhabited as lightly entwined and then passed through by these anonymous persons, like some creeping mist. Phantoms half stuck half undone in a phantom world—lost persons from a lost society? mubi/notebook/posts/rotterdam-2013-trembling-disturbed
Posted on: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 05:44:10 +0000
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