The Tiger´s Mind
Tokyo Giants
Unsupported Transit
by Nicolas Provost, Belgium
by Zachary Formwalt, The Netherlands
Director Beatrice Gibson once again references influential works of radical composer Cornelius Cardrew, and not only by using the title of his experimental sextet. His music also overlaps into the realm of narration as instructions under The Tiger´s Mind suggest. The musicians are becoming performers. Gibson continues, in this enthralling concept, by asking several artists to work on different film production elements (sets, Foley, narration, etc) thus developing a composition character based narrative. The result is even more fascinating as the film is almost non-figurative, abstract, thriller resembling poetics of Alain Robbe-Grillet and his Nouveaux Romains.
For some people the ordinary day-to-day activities in a common city may seem banal and creative less. For Belgium filmmaker Nicolas Provost, a Rotterdam International Film Festival veteran, this same absence of meaning opens a whole new world of possibilities. Tokyo Giants presents us with an alternative interpretation of the life of a city, based on associations of images and sounds all film fanatics recognize from notorious Yakuza films. It is, above all, an exercise of displacement, attributing meaning to the banal. In this alternative fictitious reality a drunken citizen lying on the floor becomes a suicide casualty; an ordinary woman entering a taxi turns into a kidnap victim; and a regular couple arguing in the street play a life or death game.
The construction of the future Shenzhen stock exchange becomes an elegy for the Age of Capital. The monstrous building shot with time-lapse photography almost erases all of the workers, one of the indispensable elements along with building components.
by Beatrice Gibson, UK
The structure succumbs to mélange of music and image within the confines of the film medium. The overhanging encapsulation only proves how potent this medium is. The filmmaker also tackles the Lacanian theme of language as the originator of things by referring to its ambiguity when language possesses assurance as well as the capacity to threaten. The Tiger´s Mind surpasses as a pinnacle in this year´s Tiger Shorts section, not only thanks to unpretentious avant-gardesque concepts but also due to selfreferential and intratextual tendencies which Gibson manages to deliver enchanted by comedic nuances, notwhistanding its psychodramatic form. The struggle for control over film production was never so funny, ruthless, subtle, Dadaistic and cutting-edge. Martin Kludac (Slovakia)
nisimazine rotterdam shorts // 24
Provost hyperactive vision sees opportunity at every glance, giving the audience the chance to visit a dimension of short span imagination, in a schizophrenic narrative lost somewhere between the linear and the abstract. With the aid of easily recognizable soundtracks taken from films such as Kubrick´s The Shinning or Demme´s Silence of the lambs, the painfully ordinary busy night of Tokyo becomes the stage for epic never-ending intrigue and action. Even funny at points, Tokyo Giants is a sharp reminder of the fact that the difference between what we see and what we interpret can sometimes be nothing more than a question of manipulation. Fernando Vasquez (Portugal)
The director Zachary Formwalt forms, on a three scene composition, an eloquent image of an “abbreviated form of capital.” This Marxist concept is enriched by notorious anecdotes about Muybridge´s bet, which eventually led to the origins of cinematography. Formwalt achieves to illustrate his point concisely by putting the haunting example of time-lapse photography and the voiceover of an unflattering Marxist vision of the future of capital. The world where inputs of human labor and materials have become redundant will be short-lived. The seemingly philosophers´ stone, a status that money has acquired, is not so inexhaustible. It cannot generate another wealth for all eternity. Unsupported Transit delivers a strong and gloomy statement as predicted by the controversial prophet. However, the most fascinating aspect of this film is the parable about Muybridge itself and the grammar of cinema being capable to project such abstract ideas. Besides the apocalyptic message, there is hidden ode to cinema underneath.
Martin Kludáč (Slovakia)