1
It's pretty impossible to give an adequate number rating to films like this.
If you're reading this review, you're probably familiar enough with Snow to know what to expect from this film. I had seen a number of his other avant-garde classics, but was told this was his magnum-opus.
Like Snow's other structural works, on paper this may sound tedious: a 3 hour exploration of a landscape. But the movement, while slow at first, becomes breathtaking and even exhilarating. I never got as bored as I had expected, and I didn't have a problem with watching the film, but the sound started to get to me. After 90 minutes, I had to leave and take a break. It's not a deliberately assaultive soundtrack as some other films I've seen, but the repetitive mechanical noises, one of which sounds like a telephone ring, must have been the perfect tone to make me deeply uncomfortable and cause a headache. Part of that could also be that I was listening to these on a tiny, old speaker.
2
experienced in a large room - filling the space with sound and vision. Possibly on multiple screens. It's something you actually EXPERIENCE, not WATCH.
Try seeing it alone at night, it's pretty scary and chilling and alien. I believe that's the difference between great experimental art and just random stuff made just to show off. True art always creates some kind of strong emotion or response.
There is just space and time, no gravity, no past, no future. After three hours of seeing the film and living its presence you should get an idea of this.
This is a film that does away with anthropocentrism and embraces the posthuman potential of cinema. Your gaze mares with the gaze of the machine, the gaze of the camera.
