Kohlberger has managed, with his latest film, to do with color what I only thought was possible with optical printing on film. It's something medium-dependent and so vibrant that, combined with his expert use of digital strobing (perhaps a better term here than "flicker" in how the actual medium uses light), the film becomes a wholly immersive treatise on how light creates color. Probably the masterpiece of digital cinema on a 'materialist' level, which is a strange thing to think about but ultimately something I think we've been edging towards since early primitive forms of digital, but this is 100% a perfect coalescing of the "structural" ideas. On top of that, there's an essayistic narrative that is fucking prescient and right on and smart as hell that somehow is integrated with the ostensible abstraction we are watching; that somehow adds to the experience rather than detracts from it. This is an extremely fucking exciting, and extremely fucking good, film.

The 2019 Berlin IFF is trying to murder
me; please send immediate assistance.
Just double billed two of the absolute
best films that I have seen in EPOCHS.

Remember, being a person means being concerned that you might not be a person. The mind is a strange loop, I think therefore I am, right?

what this film was, I haven’t quite found the right words to express yet and this review is an illustration only to remind me of my numbed senses as I sit nonplussed on the sofa; two films that I am instantly reminded of are Phil Solomon’s Rehearsals for Retirement and Jennifer Reeves’ Trains are for Dreaming for the shared existential dread and aesthetic bandwidth. also, shocked at how effective the few short windows of dissolve to blacks were for making me acknowledge my own reality as I got increasingly entranced by and sucked into what would be a visual and philosophical whirlpool where surreal imagery and ideas of memory and reality overwhelmed cartesian and platonist thoughts so much so that it started to get scary.

:you really aren’t the same person after you finish watching this

Lose the narration and this is maybe the greatest film of the 21st century. Definitely the most important. Unfortunately, the narration really takes me out of it.

Also, that soundwork is GOD TIER. Holy shit.

bill it with Wax

I think therefore I am. Right?

Shoutout to Noah for the link to the film

What is vision?

But perceptions of the mind, chemicals, shut off when you die. Leaving nothing. Leaving everything gone.

Leaving abstractions.

Rainer Kohlberger takes us on a trip through the metaphysical, showing Loire after and before death in electromagnetic shifting on television sets, featuring people, locations, and a sci fi story.

The logical and absolutely conclusive reflection on singularity.

There is zero distinction between organic and mechanical.

Ferocious. Top 10.

Wave of the future dude

This film is like having a friend come up to you at a party, usher you into a quiet room, and then show you a video of something completely impossible on their phone. Once the video is done they leave and return to the party without another word. You don't see them for the rest of the night.

The next day you try to ask them what that video was but they act like they don't know what you're talking about. All attempts to find that video turn up nothing. Eventually, you become convinced that the video never existed at all.

Maybe the impossible thing they show is this film, maybe it isn't. I like experimental films that are also horror movies and this is definitely that. Incredibly textural. The fucking textures, people. Fucking wild.

what

احا ايه دا

Love this shit

last and first men but spicy

“Neurons are dancing like waves, river and ocean. And so we drown, believing that to drown is to surf. Oceans had mermaids , all that shit and we have a sea of silicon, see?”

the world does not exist. we make up how it looks.

what is perception from the eyes of something that isn't just us.

my eyes hurt.

One of those film experiences that is probably greatly diminished if watched on anything less than the big screen with complete surround sound. It is glitchy, loose and hypnotic. Lulling you into the existential meditation that it is leading through the narration. Even though I watched on a smaller screen than I would have liked, the visuals are still inventive and feel new. Some great use of video synthesizer! The narration might be the weakest point, felt very typical of this kind of style. But you don't even need narration to enjoy this, truly a visual experience.

my mind, ears, and eyes are as fried as the sights and sounds in this short

but...i don't care

there may be other films in the 21st century are "better", but...there are none as forward in heart and mind as this. it's not just the modern prometheus; it's a living, breathing, beautiful yet monstrous scripture of the end of the world made as anxieties about it are sky-high, all along with the the devastation that comes with adapting. the losses and gains from our increasingly possible doom that taps into my existential anxiety in a way few other works of art can

i can't even think straight

most important film of the 21st century in my book, and one that will only serve to become more ominous as 2030 and beyond approaches

la tuya por si acaso

No words. A work of passionate art. Will need to watch a few more times. Stunning stuff.

The walls of your body, the border between your soul and the rest of the world starts to crumble down
Hard to explain, Hard to describe. It really has to be.... lived (Once?)
Actually you can kind of describe it? It's an avant garde film where the visuals are made up of TV static and heavily manipulated imagery that hardly resemble the original thing. Lights and colors and movement that work with the soundtrack as a very hypnotic attack on the senses. waves of sea and human who look like aliens, the beginning and end of time, the primordial soup and the vastness of space. with a voice over narration talking some philosophy about the unity of the universe, everything is everything, you are everything, yet nothing is real..
So this is basically the instrumentality from Neon Genesis Evangelion without the sexual frustration

How come we take an individual to be a primary thing, a given thing, when the word itself suggests otherwise?

Closest that the audio-visual medium has come to distilling and portraying pure consciousness imo. And to do it through aggressive digital abrasion and poetic musings about like the dark essence of humanity?? Fun times. It actually changed my perspective on the concept of singularity. It’s nightmare fuel and it’s my new comfort film.