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For the turbulent cosmos of a vacant Manhattan loft, the spaceship of a 16mm zoom. The bull's-eye on the opposite wall is a picture pinned between four vertical windows, the destination turns out to be a mirage of blue pixels. The trajectory is splintered by stutters and flares, scorched filters and solarized shifts, switches to green, purple, black, red. Traffic noises give way to centrifugal aural distortion, "Strawberry Fields Forever" squeaking out of a portable radio and an electronic hum that heightens into a shriek. In the middle of it yet barely noticed by the inexorable lens, a murder mystery: Hollis Frampton steps into frame and promptly keels over, Amy Taubin reports it blankly on the telephone, grainy figures rattling in a canvas that has little use for human impermanence. "Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about..." A vigorous sort of poetry akin to Rilke on mirrors and empty rooms for Michael Snow's structuralist pirouette, as pleasurably deconstructive as Duck Amuck. The tops of passing trucks and buses comprise a tangible yet illusory outside world, store marquees are suddenly seen through the opaque glass panes and it's a magical effect, a slew of new characters popping up. Perception as a tour of the haunted house, cinema as an unstoppable mechanism devouring space and time. A work of remarkable formal luminosity and violence, grueling, witty and visceral. Leone has the elusive oceanic portrait for the villainous tycoon in Once Upon a Time in the West, Lester in The Bed Sitting Room transforms Sir Ralph Richardson into a plummy chamber.
--- Fernando F. Croce |