My initial reaction to this film was how very abstract it was. I have to admit, I have never watched anything similar to it so this was a new experience for me. I am a transfer student from the UK and this class is the most creative one I have ever taken, which is exciting but at the same time quite intimidating as I feel challenged and out of my comfort zone.
So, back to the film. The sound was one the most influential elements of it for me. I found certain parts of the sound fairly uncomfortable to listen to, it felt quite harsh and seemed as though it had been mashed up together without much thought. (Although I’m sure that ‘mashed up’ effect was Neubauer’s intention) This random mix made the film quite disorientating and confusing to listen to and it did not feel as though the sound flowed, instead it was rather jumpy. At one point there was a 30 second or so excerpt which comprised of upbeat music paired with pictures of flowers. I found this combination was easier to take in and lighter on the ears. At certain points there was some background noise which sounded like muffled voices. This was quite distracting. I noticed that the images were influenced by the sound – in the fact that the louder the sound became, the larger the images appeared on screen, and therefore the smaller the images were, the quieter the sound was. I think this relates to the cymatics reading we did when we saw the sand moving with the vibrations.
This leads into the images seen in the short film. As far as colours go, they seemed to be particularly vibrant and for me they were reminiscent of the 1970s and the ‘flower power’ era; this was due to the combination of the flowers with the bright, ‘in your face’ neon colours which were displayed. The images varied from being very sharp shapes such as triangles and squares, to being softer, including fireworks and the aforementioned flowers. This diversity made the film interesting to watch. Although I found it a very fast paced, almost overwhelming eight minutes of film, at the same time it was impossible to tear my eyes away from the screen, afraid that I might miss something. It was a new experience for me to watch a film which did not require me to analyse why the film was made the way it was and instead look at the experiments tried with the sound and images. Overall, I found the film exciting because it was such a novel genre to me and it intrigued me into wanting to see more like it.
