Film review: The Otolith Group, Medium Earth & Anathema, ±100'

The Otolith Group, Medium Earth & Anathema. ±100'

#review

Review by RW

Online and offline, we came together.

In front of a camera at home, or physically in the same space.

Every head visible on the big screen.

Feedback sounds fill the space when more than one computer is unmuted.

‘If you first mute then I will unmute, say what you want to say then mute so I can unmute again.’ In our enthusiasm we forgot and we started our opinion/question/thought too early, unhearable online, or creating feedback in the room.

Communicating computers. Rewinding, repeating, reformulating, actually makes the second attempt clearer than the first one. We defined structures, words before meaning, meaning before context, context defining words.

Two movies:

First one, yellow at the beginning accidentally protected our eyes, but later in the original colors we got rocks, time, change, and poetics. The Otolith Group shows and speaks, projecting human emotions on the natural environment. Is that authentic? Does it need to be as close to reality as possible? Can humans even not humanize?

The camera follows the contour of the mountain range, beautifully moving up and down to the left. The camera goes so fast. What tempo do rocks have? So much slower than we, I feel it’s almost perverse.

The second movie had many beginnings and many endings, musically and visually. Many images, many thoughts. They took me, they dropped me, they took me, they dropped me, they took me, they dropped me.

The Otolith Group, their titles, their subjects, their images, their sounds, their information, their knowledge, their research comes close and inspires me but their films left me in distress.

Also: happy dog and cat conversations weaved through the day. We have hopeful futures laying ahead of us with and without our four-legged friends.