Werner Nekes - Makimono

Werner Nekes - Makimono
1974, 16mm, color Iso, 38m,

Sound by Anthony Moore.


Unfolding of a continuously varying impression of the representation of a landscape.
MAKIMONO reflects the horizontal and vertical legibility of film. The progression of filmic language.

"One can see again the very beautiful MAKIMONO of Werner Nekes already presented at the Cinemathèque Francaise... is beyond the experimental. It's a work which gives itself as - and gives us - the joy and excitement of fullness".
Helmuth Fenster, L'Art Vivant (Aus: canyon cinema, film/video catalog 2000)

Makimono is an Asian roll painting depicting a landscape. The subject of the film is the language of film itself, its mutability and its influence on the viewer's vision and thinking. While the film gradually progresses the viewer is gently invited to reflect on the development of the film in its expressive potential.

"The title refers to Japanese landscape painting on rolls. Furthermore it indicates the film's theme, the balance of colors (blurred tones of blue, green and grey) and the type of montage that gives priority to continuity of development rather than to disruption and contrast. This continuity is achieved by dissolvings and double exposures and by extremely long pans. The rhythm accelerates: a meditation on landscape, which unfolds before the eye or is visually paced out, gives way to fluidity and pure motion, to a feeling of dizziness, the result of two contrasting camera movements. The world resembles a reflection in the water; then, however, rapid montage creates a calligraphy consisting of the quick and sharp black strokes of a Hartung painting, until one finally arrives at the glittering simplicity of an early movie where each frame still retains the weight of its individual tracks, of earth and of the world. Anthony Moore's Soundtrack strikingly agrees with the images presented and by means of three consecutive modulations bestows unto them the structure of a concerto". (Helmuth Fenster, L'Allemagne à Knokke. In: L'Art Vivant, Paris, Feb. 1975).


From: http://www.expcinema.com/site/


MAKIMONO is to be considered as the european answer to the Michael Snow's La Région Centrale.
If the snowesque perception of space is involved with Kant's trascendental structures, the Werner Nekes' film entangles its representation with jittering oriental punctiform perspectives.
The motion-like streaming fades progressively into a flickering flim-flam light, meanwhile a sort of bird-flight-rendering interweaves the earth and the sky spaces, in which the eye observing is a part of landscape itself and incubates together this one (as in the ancient chinese painting pingyuan-like).
The soundtrack accelerates up to a continuum noisy pitch agreeing the images speed.
This great masterwork testifies the static rolling-by of cinematic vision and features a post-experimental aesthetics versus the Michael Snow's belief of sovereign possibilities of medium as neutral recording of space-time.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• experimental
• cinema
• structural
• flickering
• landscape
• chinese
• painting
• pingyuan
• makimono
• werner
• nekes
• la
• région
• centrale
• michael
• snow
• calligraphy
• shodò
• hans
• hartung
• blurred
• tones
• meditation
• on
• double
• exposures
• eastern
• thought
• expanded

[quiglio9]

lieber einen monet betrachten

[trojan123321]

I feel how this uncommon film talks to me.. i feel the essence..

[Vesters1]

this is very obscure