Excerpt from my notes after attending the Visual Underground’s “Theatre Scorpio & Japanese Experimental Cinema of the Sixties”…
The film “Wols” was the program’s stand-out, consisting of vague flashes of what sometimes felt like eerily familiar child-like drawings and accosting the viewer with outer-space sound effects. Reminiscent of David Lynch’s paintings and sketches not only visually but in it’s strange sense of humor, the film never shows the image in it’s entirety and occasionally pauses on the handwritten word “Wols” in reverse, changing it to read “sloW”. As the film continues, it’s speed increases and the shots begin to gravitate towards the drawing itself, moving closer and closer; eventually showing the fibers of the paper under such magnification and with so much momentum that it creates a sort of disjointed and seemingly unintentional animation of the fibers, resembling water.
…god.
