Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Spira Mirabilis (2016)

Spira Mirabilis is a documentary supposedly about immortality. Though you wouldn't necessarily know it from watching the movie. This is a very challenging film. It challenges you to stay awake through scenes of nothingness. There is very little dialogue, quite unusual for a documentary, a genre that relies on explaining things. You watch people do mundane tasks. Sometimes it's kind of mesmerizing--the petri dish underneath the microscope. Other times it isn't. For instance, we watched a caravan of vans drive through the desert for a solid minute. You watch a pair make something out of metal for the whole film, and its not till the end when you figure out what it is. It's a drum, by the way. Not a big spoiler, because it's not really clear what the drum has to do with anything. Essentially, there are these unconnected stories, very very loosely connected by a theme of immortality (VERY loose). I don't know how they came up with this film in the first place. I wonder if they found these separate projects and then said, "How can we put these unrelated things all in one movie?" Or did they first come up with the concept and then look for the projects to film? Either one would be astounding because honestly they are all so unrelated that it is unfathomable that anyone could piece them together.

No comments:

Post a Comment