Schwechater (1958)

Category:

,

Tags:

First off, who the fuck is commissioning Kubelka for an advertisement? I love Kubelka, but it is an objectively terrible (and hilarious) idea to pay him to create an advertisement.

It starts with the empty unit (black). The next unit exhibits the cinematic possibility of divorcing image and sound, the sound sync not-in-sync. A series of vertically moving letters accompanied by a whir, then the whir and no letters, then the letter divorced from the whir.

Then, the countdown unit. An alien symbol that commences it. It starts from 11, instead of 10. The 2 is skipped (a cost paid for the extra one, 11). Finally, an inverted image of the 1.

The final unit is a scene. A woman, a man, a few other people drinking something, a hand grabbing (?) something dominating the frame, and something starry, like outer space. As we move through permutations of these frames, inverted alternately, the white (or black) proceeds to wash over the entire visualscape, at times, in an incremental fashion. However, the film ends before it can fully annihilate the visual (only white/black). Additionally, like the sequences expressing their combinatory possibilities, a singular or a double beep inserts itself at a different scene or a two-element scene-set.


Discover more from Niranjan Orkat

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *