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Slow Volumes (Mike Gibisser, 2019)
🕑 Added 2019-09-04 18:29:42 +0000 UTC
A bit of domestic abstraction, Slow Volumes employs a 35mm camera at the center axis of both a living room and a particular point in a field outdoors, and spins out a highly relatable horizontal blur regarding those things closest to its maker. Granted, we cannot be certain that the people and things on display are Mike Gibisser's home and family, but there is undoubtedly a rhetoric of familiarity at work that organizes the film. Stripes of velocity rush past the screen like a leaving train, and then slowly resolve into windows, furniture, the patterns on a running child's sweater.
Sound also plays a significant part in Slow Volumes' overall organization. We hear low rumblings, suburban sounds like the beeping of garbage trucks, and the increasingly sharp whistle of a tea kettle. The catalog description compares the film to Michael Snow, and of course, <--> is an obvious influence, but the audio seems to be a nod to Wavelength as well.
But more than anything, I was reminded of the Super-8 films of John Porter, who made a series of centrifugal films, tying his camera to a string and then spinning it around him. There is a similar sense of ocular wiping and smearing in Slow Volumes, where objects (or "volumes") tend to devolve into bands of color that widen or thin as they go. Gibisser does slow down and speed up the effect to some small extent, allowing coherent shapes and figures to emerge. But there's not really a sense that Slow Volumes provides us with a new perspective on what is an established technique within the arsenal of experimental filmmaking.
