Reseñas (1)
The American avant-garde of structural film, to which this film belongs, is a cinematic offshoot of the contemporary intellectual movement that found much more in language than just a neutral means of communication. Words do not merely reflect reality; they change and even transform it according to their own image. With its claim to totalization, the language system serves as a model for the systematicity of human action and thought (and even the most inner processes within ourselves as Lacan postulated when he said that the unconscious is structured like a language). Words and language thus create their own system, to which both the surrounding social world and we submit, as we view the world according to its system. An illustrative example from this film is that individual letters are gradually removed from a series and replaced by the same images of reality (for example, the letter "f" is replaced by a tree). This automatically prompts the viewer to seek the connection between these images and the letter "f" or words beginning with "f". This is, of course, due to the fact that the film initially constructs the entire sequence solely from words. However, this is only a reminder that language (without which human orientation in the world is not possible) always precedes perceived reality. Another example of how words subject reality to themselves is the constant repetition of individual shots of reality. The continuous repetition of the same alphabetical system prevents short shots of reality from exceeding the predetermined space and forces them, along with letters/words, to repeat an endless loop. Interestingly, after the last word disappears, the fragments of reality also disappear because reality cannot be understood without the system of words, the same system that cruelly defines and limits reality. Of course, the film offers much more (due to a completely different filmmaking approach, the introduction and ending are the subject of quite different reflections). For example, some letters, just before they disappear, are represented by words like "system" in the case of "s" and "cycle" in the case of "c" (which is the very last letter in the entire cycle).
()