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IMPRESSION X  

 

by Véronique David-Martin (April 12, 2023)s

A decade ago, I first encountered Roy Rezaäli’s film-making through his little gem of a remodernist short called Tulp/Tulip. I wrote a review about it. Ten years later, Roy contacted me about his new film, Impression X, and it’s been a pleasure and a privilege for me to watch it and now to write a review about it.
I must say first that I’m not a filmmaker: I’m just a film and art lover; I’m also an author whose whole body of work is about getting in touch with our inner creativity and much neglected unconscious. I will not therefore talk about the technical aspects of super 8mm film or the long take but will concentrate on the effect this film has had on me and potentially other viewers. 
Roy’s film, Impression X, after multiple viewings, has left me with a powerful sense of being a point of access to the unconscious, that is the place of revelations behind the crispness of reality and behind the lure of appearances. This review will briefly present each of the 16 films that make the full film, giving so to speak my humble impressions about Impression X. I will then try to explain my statement about the unconscious. 
Through my search for access to the unconscious, whether in my personal or creative life, I’m particularly sensitive to three things:

  1. Atmospheres (of places, people, art...);

  2. Music, which can be a door into the depths of ourselves and is my only requisite to be able to write;

  3. Motion, as I’m hyper sensitive to it to the point of vertigo, and notice movement in all its forms.


These three things are all central in the 16 films that are Impression X.

The introduction to the film and the first short are by Jonathan Hancock and Hsin-Wei Chen. The two films melt into each other in terms of atmosphere and the soundtrack links them both together. 
This intro works beautifully as a presentation of the film. The music is evocative of a mood, the images are grainy and the camera handheld. This will be the general feel of the whole film: a series of moments, snapshots or slices of life, filmed like an experimental family movie or travelogue. It looks human and feels warm. It’s not machine-like, impersonal, clearcut or cold.
We are in a city somewhere, where everyday human life is happening. We recognise it yet it feels different. There is both an intimacy and a distance between us and its participants. No fake effort here to make us believe we are inside their life; others are to us both familiar and mysterious. We’re outside looking in onto the travellers on the train: they are our fellow travellers but they each are locked in their personal bubbles, behind a phone screen or a book. The next scene of a man loading boxes on a truck may be a sort of allegory of society and of the film: we all come in different shapes and sizes yet we must all fit in together. It’s the same with the sixteen films that make Impression X.
We are told by the music of the intro and first short to “check this out” and it does feel indeed like a genuine invitation. We can tell from the start that we are being taken on a journey (the path the camera follows in a park symbolises it). In this cinematic journey, the camera will keep on rolling and we, the viewers, will have to be active participants, checking what we think and feel about what we are presented with along the way.

 

The second short, Paradise Lost, by Nick Zedd, gives us an indication of place: it happens in Mexico City. We are in an artist studio where the unconscious and conscious worlds of the artist seem to cohabit seamlessly if not peacefully as there is a lot of contrasting and apparent torment in the film. Paintings of grotesque or even horrific alien faces and giant insects on the walls, statues of crucified alien creatures and of alien looking dolls, are exposed on the walls. A glimpse of a beautiful young boy calmly sitting in the studio feels like an anomaly in this nightmarish environment. A slightly skewed likeness of him is reflected in a painting. The louche presence of a nude model, with makeup reminiscent to that of a cabaret artist, adds another human touch to the scene and another contrast to the child. The title of the short is making total sense.
The soundtrack is not musical but clicking and mechanical: it’s the sound of a film wheel. The colour palette is a grey scale of black and white, the camera sweeps the space and merges these different images together into one world, that of the unknown artist. 
When a man arrives in the studio, the camera focuses on his back, deeper and deeper, to the point where all becomes black:  the man is the centre of it all, he must be the artist. The black screen is anything but empty, it’s alive with texture and movement, as if we were plunged into a micro-universe of particles. Black is also a mark of transition, here between the studio and the outside world, a street where the man and the young boy walk hand in
hand, where the artist, the film maker and the father of the boy are one.

The next film called 16 adivinanzas de un astronauta hindú (16 riddles of a Hindu astronaut) by Eduardo Castillo Salgado, is tied to the previous one by place (Mexico City) and by the soundtrack of the film wheel that melts into the music of this new short. Like the previous film, this one is in black and white, but here the monochrome palette is used in a more stylised way, playing with light and shadows, as well as with shapes. 
A man sits at a piano on a stage and plays a piece of music. The backdrop on the stage is a series of intricate symbols, we can presume to be Inca, such as mazes and black suns. An attractive and stylish young woman in a long dress arrives and starts going down the steps from the stage. There’s a play on the black and white motif on her dress as well as on the shadows on the stairs. She moves with grace to the music and starts singing. She then joins the pianist on the stage and her song becomes more and more passionate. The singer and the pianist are both interested in the backdrop and spend some time studying it. The symbols and the music are the links between the two protagonists, and all form the riddles the viewer is left pondering about. The charm is powerful but
the mystery remains whole.


The fourth short, Marie, by Mike Nedved, takes place in Pomona, California. It is also filmed in black and white but used in a different manner that creates a very different atmosphere. A pretty young blonde woman is filmed close up. The camera moves to take in where the scene is happening and the blonde girl becomes more like an impression of a pretty young woman having a fun time, sitting in a pod on a big wheel at a fair. 
The view from the pod is quite vertiginous and the people on the ground look like dots. Other wheels, smaller than the one we’re in, imply the existence of many similar scenes of playful excitement all over the fairground. The fun, although experienced privately, is a unifying experience. The white structures that make the wheel are lingered on by the camera perhaps because of the intricacy of their shape but also maybe to show they look solid enough, reminding us of the danger of hanging in the air so high. The soundtrack is quite dark and destabilising, expressing vertigo or perhaps this feeling of menace behind the laughter. Laughing is a well-known release from stress or even fear. Adrenaline leads to excitement because of the complex mix of fun, fear and their release. 
Black and white, fun and fear, a private moment in a crowded fun park, and incessant movement. Marie’s essence is caught by the film-maker, in the blur of a thrilling moment at the fair. 


The contrast between the mellow monochrome of Marie and the vivid colours of the following film, La Chua Trail and Alachua Sink by Kate Shults, feels like a shock. There’s also a profound contrast between Marie’s constant camera motion and this short’s absolute camera stillness. 
We are now in Gainesville, Florida. The camera is filming the scene from one fixed point, no movement at all, and it’s the distant characters in the landscape that are moving. The long take here is quite literal. It reminded me of a surveillance camera. 
The focus of the short is that place: the people promenading along its path are pleasant distractions but of little importance as the landscape itself remains unchanged. 
A man with a pushchair, a baby and a child, seems to be walking away from the camera but it’s an illusion as we notice then that he’s actually walking towards us. A group of women, a couple of fishermen and a couple of walkers are also having a stroll in this beautiful place, but each of them remains enclosed in their own little world. The place represents a sort of stable point: it’s been there for ever and can be experienced by all, while its visitors all remain in their own transient, little individual spheres. At the end, the image fades into light.

 

The sixth short, How to walk to the Moon, by Jonathan Hancock, takes place at New Smyrna Beach, Florida. It starts with a child-like (but in no way childish, as the road to wisdom is through the child within ourselves) man walking on top of the wooden ramp of an elevated walkway above marshy sand. The man’s obvious delight at being in touch with the child inside himself is fostered by the camera zooming on his playful steps, the film being in colour and the joyful jazzy soundtrack: the atmosphere is tender but also full of energy. 
We never see this man’s face: he is an everyman; he is anyone of us. We can identify with the special delight he gets as he rekindles the simple joys of his childhood. Childhood is a magical time when we naturally stride seamlessly the worlds of reality and of our imagination, of our conscious and of our unconscious, a talent most of us lose with maturity, but which true artists retain.
The joyous man-boy’s steps lead us to a beach, where we leave him to go on walking with the camera towards the sea. On our way we encounter different snapshots of life, a car race, cyclists, walkers and surfers. We stop for no one and just go-on moving towards the sea, then into the sea. The camera grounds us for a moment with a glimpse of the film-makers shoes in the water. We are still in that magical child-like mood. Then the magic takes over the camera to allow us to embrace everything around itself/us: the sun and the sky, the ripples of sand and water. In a fast circular movement and as the music gets faster and faster, everything, beach, sand, sky, sea, people, buildings become one. The world is harmonious and fun and fast. The sun is shining in a clear sky. The paradise of childhood recaptured!


The seventh short, by Roy Rezaäli, is an alternative travelogue, filmed in subdued colour, in Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname. It is in fact a trio of shorts that are very tightly linked together through style, location, music and theme. Actually, I should say these three shorts are a travelogue into Paramaribo, as movement is central to the filming but also to the greater arc of these three short films, each called after the place or landmark where it is taking place: Goslar, Heiligenweg and Zondagsmarkt.
Goslar is our arrival piece in the travelogue: we are on a small boat, bobbing along the huge Suriname river, taking in its atmosphere, movement and colours. It’s not “shown to” us, it’s an experience “shared with” us. (I even started feeling a bit nauseous because of my motion sickness and had to watch it further away from the screen, so vivid was the experience of being there, on the water.) 
The sky is blue with fluffy clouds; the music is a Spanish sounding guitar. A huge bridge is straddling the river: one of its shores looks like a town with trees and tiled roofs; the other looks like industrial docks. On that industrial shore, we discover the glorious and massive metallic skeleton of the Goslar, a German ship scuttled by its own crew during WW2. It’s a historical landmark but you don’t need at all to know this to appreciate it. I first took it for a piece of modern architecture. It could be an eyesore but works as a beautifully strange monument glistening in the landscape.
The second short, Heiligenweg, takes us onto the town shore. It starts with a zoom on a statue of Ghandi, and my first reaction is to wonder what ties him to this place. A complex and fraught history of commerce, colonisation and slavery has brought many people to Suriname and has made it a multicultural place rich in influences and diversity. This richness is just suggested here and worked for me as an invitation for the viewer with an inquisitive mind to research the city and country. The more contemplative viewer can just enjoy the ride, for it is a ride, a laid back one to the sound of dub reggae (another clue about the local multiculturalism).
We are in a place of human activity but very few humans are to be seen. It looks like a bus station, full of buses and minibuses, emptied of customers or waiting to be filled. We move around the vehicles and feel a sense of expectation.  Where have the people gone? Our first clue is the street where we then move to: Heiligenweg, the “holy street” in Dutch. Is this the place of pilgrimage to which the buses have brought all the people? It certainly is a place of friendly activity where people mingle between shops and food/drink stalls, the pace of life feeling unhurried, like the short’s dub soundtrack.
The last short of the trilogy, Zondagsmarkt, feels like its apex: we have reached our destination. The goal of the pilgrimage seems to have been the “Sunday Market”, where locals are selling the rich yield of fruits and vegetables from their farms or gardens as well as some homemade products. It’s a place of joy and activity. The music is another laid back dub track and the camera takes us on a tour. Shapes, colours, people and products mingle in the constant movement of the camera. It gives a unifying sensation that any single part of this market is as important as the others to create the spirit of the place.
This trilogy is not a tour of Paramaribo in a material sense but it is a very personal rendition of the place that will impact anyone sensitive to atmospheres. Roy doesn’t give us a literal rendition of this place but a rendition of its essence, captured in its incessant movement, by his sensitive camera.

 

The eighth short, I love you, Goodbye by Giovanni Cabenda, although filmed in Paramaribo too, brings in a total change of mood. The music and blue-green tinge of the film create a nostalgic impression, reminiscent of old 1970s photos or home movies, whose colours have faded over time. 
We are in the world of a young woman standing by an open window, smoking a cigarette and drinking alcohol straight from a bottle. She leaves the window and the camera follows, panning dreamily on the walls. The aquatic, turquoisy tone and the strange screens on the wall, stamped with the young woman’s silhouetted profile and the title words of the short, also give a sense of being in a dream. Is this real or are we floating in the vagueness of someone else’s unconscious or memories? 
The shocking conclusion of the film, that introduces a second character, however tragic it appears, is somewhat mellowed by the general sensation of dreaming.


The ninth short, 2515 GP by Benny Palmer, happens in The Hague and couldn’t be more different in its feel. With its reggae soundtrack and its sharp monochrome urban aesthetics, it reminded me of the stylised vibe of the ska scene. We/the filmmaker are driving along in a car, not sightseeing touristic landmarks but cruising leisurely in residential streets. As we move along and the camera keeps rolling, the sunlight at times becomes so bright that it saturates the image and swallows all details. A moment later, the light recedes and details start appearing again. A few people are walking around but they remain distant, shapes rather than individuals. As the city is seen in a dark under-exposed or in a bright over-exposed way, we can imagine the human complexities hidden behind the apparently banal, everyday scenes. This is not life; it is filmed life. The mundane made special by being fixed on film. The positive and the negative, the real and the abstract revealed to us virtually at once: our way of experiencing everydayness questioned. 

 

The tenth short, The Nature of Relationships by Joanna Pilatowicz, takes us on a deeply personal and emotional journey. After the monochrome of the previous film, we are reintroduced to colour, and after the urban setting we find ourselves again in nature, on a beach. There’s an organic feel to the film as we are by the sea and drops of water appear on the lens. A woman’s feet anchor the voice-over onto a female narrator (the filmmaker?). Then the camera concentrates on the landscape, a sea that becomes more and more choppy. The coast, with a lighthouse, is blurred by fog. There is a subtle harmony between the voice speaking about the difficulties in a relationship to be loving without losing oneself and the stormy landscape. It reminded me of the notion in poetry of pathetic fallacy when the landscape reflects human feelings. The wise conclusion of the narration that all love has to be freely given instead of forcibly expected takes us back to the narrator’s feet, with a profound human lesson learnt.
 

The eleventh short, From Ferrol to Fisterra by Juan Gabriel Gutiérrez, takes us quite literally to one of these land extremities called “Land’s End” in many countries, in this case in Spain. There’s a pleasing thematic continuity with the previous film as it feels like we have been teleported to the lighthouse featured on the coast in “The Nature of Relationships”. This is a hypnotic black and white film, recorded from a fixed camera, the light effects created by the rotating lenses of a lighthouse lantern. We are here at the very heart of the magic of optics. This life saving light, like a giant eye beaming hope into the darkness of the sea, becomes here a magic lantern, creating spectres or chimeras, eerie reflections and shapes that remind us of the very early days of cinema. The piano music that accompanies the film strengthens this association as it reminded me of the scores accompanying silent movies. This short that takes us both at the end of the land and at the very roots of the magic of cinema creates in the viewer a precious meditative state.

The twelfth short, Kid by Viktor Gibárti, is filmed in colour in Budapest, Hungary. It is an action packed short that plays on the fragility of our judgement and perception. 
The film looks like a computer game but, instead of shooting at cartoon characters, the mouth of the gun in the foreground shoots at real people. We immediately think it must be a comment on the violence of these games and of possible copy cat murders happening in real life. 
When the camera (and gun) enters a living room where a couple is peacefully relaxing, the fact they show no fear challenges what we’ve seen. The camera then turns on itself to show their viewpoint and we discover that the “killer” is just a little boy armed with a broom stick (the war game was in his imagination). The couple are his parents. This could be just a light-hearted short but it has, I felt, a darker edge as it made me think of the ending of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”, where the arrival of adults on the island shockingly reminds us that the monsters in the story are just kids. 
The last shift of perception happens in a sort of addendum to the short. The filmmaker playfully challenges us again and forces us to take a distance towards any hasty interpretation. He reminds us that what we’ve watched was not for real by ending his film on a last joyous snapshot of his cast and crew posing together for a photo.


The thirteenth short, …throw your dreams to the wind like a kite… by Kat McDonald, is filmed on an empty beach in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. It is a deeply personal and intimate film; a beautiful meditation on dreams, youth, disappointment, maturity and freedom. The film’s choice of black and white is nostalgic and romantic (in the literary sense): there’s a warmth and a softness about it.
A pretty young woman in a long, lacy, romantic dress dances on the sand by the edge of the sea. The voice over is a poem, read by a woman (perhaps the filmmaker), that takes us from the dreams of childhood, painfully lost like a kite in the wind, to those of adulthood, let go of willingly as an act of empowerment and rebirth. It echoed, to me, the freedom in love extolled in the film by Joanna Pilatowicz. Maturity is achieved by a series of renunciations that lead to empowerment and self-truth. Two very soulful and emotive narratives that reach
into the depths of the human experience.
 

The fourteenth short, Uh-huh by Tobias Morgan, takes place in Katowice, Poland. The film is shot in black and white but here there’s no softness or romanticism. The set is minimalist and the protagonist is a rock musician playing a guitar. We soon notice that there is a delay between the sound and the image; I should say that this delay soon becomes a clear disconnection between the man and the soundtrack. A voice-over and the music have a life of their own as does the guitarist’s shadow swaying more and more wildly behind him. 
The film first creates in its viewer a feeling of confusion and fragmentation but then, the shadow and the man being disassociated made me think of gothic stories where the soul is having a life of its own; it also reminded me of the German character, Peter Schlemihl, who sold his shadow to the Devil. 
What is real? The shape of this man or his dancing shadow? The music he hears himself playing or the soundtrack we, the spectators, perceive? The music of his unconscious or that of his conscious? Does it matter? All of it is made real and simultaneous as the camera keeps rolling: film making the invisible visible.

 

The fifteenth short, Encounter#01 by Paulo Abreu, happens in Lagares da Beita, Portugal. First the screen is black and we are introduced into the film through sounds: bird songs but also strange alien sounds. We’re back in nature, managed nature as we are in a beautiful, dark and overgrown old park. A young man/teenager is walking in slow motion. The camera follows him: he appears to be searching for something or someone. 
There’s a mysterious atmosphere in the short that seems to preclude a simple game of hide and seek. The boy looks in bushes along a path and we start participating in his search. When an alien face seems to appear among the foliage, we wonder whether it is an illusion or an actual vision? A “proper” alien or a mask?  As we are in the boy’s world and imagination, all is possible. Strange alien and squelchy noises can be heard, worrying and intriguing sounds that belong to some alien creatures, but the young man looks unphased and just curious. The spectator is the only one with a sense of dread, the protagonist is calm, perhaps protected by his youth. 
At the end of it all, perhaps the conclusion to this film could be that the other side (the unconscious, the imaginary, the uncanny), however alien it may seem, is not to be feared but can be glimpsed only through the fog of foliage/appearances.

 

The sixteenth short, Aquarius: In search of the dragonfly by Magdalena Jachimiak, is shot in the brightest of colours in Bentota, Sri Lanka. The camera is used in an exploratory mode and the exploration starts on a river in a luscious jungle. 
The soundtrack is full of panpipe or didgeridoo, of the calls of exotic birds as well as of the sounds of wind and water. These sounds contribute to the sense of mystery. 
The camera stays on the water and the bushes than line the shore. No sky. What are we looking for? By dint of looking, and in a sort of symbiosis with the previous short, we can almost see faces in the foliage and bones in the white branches lining the river. There are flowers of light in the trees and green reflections in the water. We are in a real place that is also a magical imaginary place. More bird songs, perhaps some wind in a windchime. Light on the water, on the plants. A sense of life, heaving and mysterious in the undergrowth.
The camera then goes on now filming on the shore, getting deeper and deeper into the vegetation. We dive into a wealth of vibrant green and confusing shapes, things looking like other things. It’s not threatening, it’s beautiful and magical. 
When at last we see the sky, it is reflected in a fragmented mirror of puddles. As we scan the unfathomable, what creature are we supposed to discover? The film “Impression X” is described as “a fauvist celebration of the long take” and to me this short is the very definition of fauvism: pure expression of emotion and creativity through colour.


The seventeenth and last short, Yoi, Yoi, Yoi by Lee Ming-Yu, takes place in Tokyo, Japan. The camera and we, the spectators, find ourselves back in a busy city, as we were at the beginning of the movie. We have been on a journey and when we reach the end of it, there’s much celebration and joy. We are actually in the middle of a carnival. Colours, light and movement fill the screen. The soundtrack is a merry cacophony of bells, drums, chanting and screams of joy.
The camera moves constantly and gives us an impression of being there, in the middle of this carnival, of its vital energy. It’s the opposite of a cold and controlled documentation: the sweeping camera melts all faces and shapes together. The chaos is positive, movement is life, colour and light are emotions, the long take is imagination allowed to flow. 

Fade to black.


This review has ended up being a long take too. I have allowed my imagination and emotions to flow along the journey Impression X has taken me on. Each short, a different story, part of the greater human narrative that we all belong to.
Human beings have always loved and needed stories to make sense of their existence. Most mainstream media offer a plethora of ready-made narratives to entertain us, from shallow gossip magazines, to novels, from TV dramas to cinema movies. Most are trying to be realistic but in doing so they often show too much, explain too much and destroy the depth and mystery that is part of the very texture of life.
True art is not descriptive: it’s a revelatory experience. Sadly, our obsessively materialistic world often denies art its extraordinary power. Because art opens our perception and leads us into the vastness of our unconscious, where the eternal human, creativity and truth in all its facets exist.
Impression X stands, to me, at a crossroads between video art and film. It doesn’t show as much as it reveals our world to us. It may reveal its filmmakers’ psyches but also ours, because it makes us, its viewers, active and creative. By not overtelling it sets us free, encouraging us to fill the blanks and add our voice to its stories. 
The chance Impression X gives us, its public, to be involved in the act of creation is powerful and precious as it leads us not outside but inside ourselves. As the great French writer, Victor Hugo, wrote « c'est au-dedans de soi qu'il faut regarder le dehors » – “it is within oneself that one must look at the outside”.



Véronique David-Martin is a Franco-British author who has written the book series “Les Maîtres de l’Orage”, published by Éditions Lemaître, and the initiatory novel AYUB, published by Éditions Philomène Alchimie. Her whole body of fiction is centred on getting in touch with our inner creativity and much neglected unconscious. She’s also a passionate lover of films, music and art, and has written film and book reviews.

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