The Soul of Things

United States

2010

15 Min

Black and White

1.33:1

Silent

Currently 3.3/5 Stars.
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DIR Dominic Angerame

New York, Venice, Toronto

Synopsis

William Denton is one of the early pioneers exploring the art and science of psychometry. Psychometrics believes that every object emits a field of energy. That energy can transit its entire history through touch. That is every brick contains the history of what happened inside its walls and outside its walls and at the same time its own history of creation. If one is sensitive enough this energy field of historical information can be transferred and one can obtain a complete knowledge of its history. In my case the touching is filming. In our urban landscape we are continually destroying our past through destruction of buildings and replacing them with artificial man made materials. Hence removing us from our very history. William Denton performed many successful experiments in the field of psychometry documented in one of his books called The Soul of Things.

The Soul of Things (USA), which starts amongst construction detritus that seems the spatial equivalent of the temporal pileup from Nishikawa’s film, as if you rotated the camera of Tokyo – Ebisu around so that all time dimensions (and trains) collapsed and this was the resulting wreckage, shown in blown out black and white. But Angerame’s narrative gradually effaces this sense, moving from ruins to demolition to construction to the bayside stasis of resting, inactive docks, stepping away from the chaos that opens the film and finding a calm clarity. –tiffreviews

Director

Dominic Angerame

Since the 1960s, the American filmmaker, theorist, and avant-garde activist Dominic Angerame has been working in a form that is both documentary and poetic, an aesthetic alliance between realism and fantasy. He employs a variety of techniques, but his films are invariably and primarily concerned with basic problems of rhythm: the nervousness of the montage in almost all Angerame films stands in startling contrast to the gentleness of its effect on the viewer. The double and triple exposures this artist prizes so much brake, as it were, the quick pulse of his cuts and help them to achieve a peculiarly delicate quality.

Dominic Angerame’s works search for unfamiliar views of seemingly familiar things: cities, landscapes, faces, and bodies. The filmmaker’s desire to make everyday images “strange” at the editing table, to learn to see them fresh and to estrange them from our senses, makes his films seem—in all the different social realities they contain—always distanced as well… read more

Since the 1960s, the American filmmaker, theorist, and avant-garde activist Dominic Angerame has been working in a form that is both documentary and poetic, an aesthetic alliance between realism and fantasy. He employs a variety of techniques, but his films are invariably and primarily concerned with basic problems of rhythm: the nervousness of the montage in almost all Angerame films stands in startling contrast to the gentleness of its effect on the viewer. The double and triple exposures this artist prizes so much brake, as it were, the quick pulse of his cuts and help them to achieve a peculiarly delicate quality.

Dominic Angerame’s works search for unfamiliar views of seemingly familiar things: cities, landscapes, faces, and bodies. The filmmaker’s desire to make everyday images “strange” at the editing table, to learn to see them fresh and to estrange them from our senses, makes his films seem—in all the different social realities they contain—always distanced as well, as if they led to another world beyond the concrete, beyond time and defined space. In Angerame’s films, which pay homage to films from early cinema and the classic avant garde to American underground films of the 1960s and 70s and non- narrative films of the present day, an amazingly comprehensive history of the “visionary” moving image is always present. It may be that precisely his refusal to adopt a signature style has diminished the immediate influence of Angerame’s films; however, Angerame’s decision to work “universally,” not to be swayed by considerations of the art market, and to experiment with very different styles increases the pedagogical worth of his films. It’s not surprising to learn that Angerame, born in 1949, teaches at several American schools in addition to being the executive director of the American avant garde distribution center Canyon Cinema. His films testify to an encyclopedic knowledge of film—and also his desire to satisfy, with his own audio-visual offerings, the very different desires of his audience.

The concept “experimental film,” by the way, doesn’t fit Dominic Angerame. It sounds, he says, like it’s just an attempt, as if he didn’t know exactly what he was doing. His practical work in film is informed by essentially one principle: the renunciation of “narrative form.” That alone seems enough to isolate a visual talent like his for a long time. Dominic Angerame is a marginalized filmmaker. The large digital movie databases don’t even know his name.

—Stefan Grissemann, The City, Refuse, Passion, and Death: On the Work of Filmmaker Dominic Angerame

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