Kubelka’s cinema is like a piece of crystal, or some other object of nature: it doesn’t look like it was produced by man.
– Jonas Mekas
In Adebar, we encounter stark black-and-white images of dancers, interrupted by frozen frames of silhouetted bodies that resolve into inhuman, almost alien forms: a compositional set, harrowingly beautiful. Moreover, this is a metrical film. A possibility that opens up when Kubelka conceives the basic unit of cinema as the frame, instead of the shot.
Kubelka is concerned with filmic metaphors. In a lecture, he outlines the basic components of cinema: image and sound. And all the possible metaphors generated from the smallest sequence (the two): image-image, sound-image, sound-sound. However, Adebar is silent. Therefore, filmic metaphors are restricted to the image alone. As a result, duration-duration, image-image, texture-texture (positive/negative).
Texture-texture is the easiest to perceive. It goes, “1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2 …”, inverting every frame. Now, the image-image metaphor. In the first repeating sequence, the moving frames are followed by their own frozen frames. But the next time, heterogeneous frozen frames appear, ⊄ ”moving frames”. Finally, the meter. The frames are 13, 26 and 52 frames long. A rhythm that I experienced as – an oscillation, a click, an abrupt slide, a click, an abrupt slide, a click, …, ending with a few slicks (statics).
A masterpiece of formal innovation.