True/False film review: Shorts: Lager 72:
The Lager shorts take viewers through 72 minutes of mind-altering studies of Earth and the people that experience it
Vox Magazine
March 3, 2018
The shorts documentary series called Lager 72 pulls viewers through a mind-altering series of visually rich and intellectually deep documentaries that push the boundaries of documentary film. Two of the films, The Making and Unmaking of the Earth and Liminals, make their film festival debut at the True/False Film Fest this year.
Pure Difference
Pure Difference, directed by Byron Peters, is a short documentary excerpted from a three-part series, Anti-Racist Mathematics and Other Stories, which explores the ongoing potential of language of technology. It is like an educational mathematics video turned pop-Marxist manifesto of the invention, evolution and use of numbers and mathematics. The computer-like narration speaks in a clear, active voice as it directs the viewer across satisfyingly vibrant moving graphics and quirky, often-humorous footage. Pure Difference comments on the growing disparity of rich and poor, the rise of alternative facts and a “love of fakeness” as it works to break down viewers’ fact-based conception of math and science into an affective mechanism of terror and greed.
Dessert-Disaster
Dessert-Disaster, directed by Alison Nguyen, is aptly self-explanatory in name and in nature. Clips of sensuous dessert commercials meet scarily satisfying ‘natural disaster porn’ in a split-screen view that forces the viewer into a tension of anxiety and pleasure. In an age of sensational media power, this 2-minute film shows contemporary society’s gluttony for destruction. It is a film for those who find the perfect drip of chocolate just as satisfying as the eruption of molten rock.
The Making and Unmaking of the Earth
The Making and Unmaking of the Earth sets a parallel between the body and the earth as vessels with a bubbling core. The director Jessica Bardsley says the film is the result of her interest in “those moments when you have no idea what’s going on inside” a person. Following an approximately 5-minute compilation of flowing molten rock, the film moves through a woman’s exploration of internal struggle, but it is visually told through the lens of the physical earth: crystal and mineral formations, mountains, caves and fossils being dug up like old memories. The Making and Unmaking of the Earth is an evenly paced exploration of the geography of self and of pain.
Liminals
Liminals, directed by Jeremy Shaw, can best be described as a clash between interpretive dance and pseudo-futuristic dystopia, mimicking the 1970s cinema vérité style and creating a satirical psycho-scientific documentary. The film follows a group of “liminals” in a future where humans have lost their ability of faith and of total experience. They are called liminals because their goal is to explore the lost connection between reality and an unknown beyond. As the film moves along and the liminals’ exercises escalate from interpretive dance to strobe light-induced transcendental experiences akin to hedonistic exorcism, the viewer cannot help but stifle a laugh or two. At the climax of spiritual experience, viewers are pulled into a stunning, beautiful and yet visually debilitating surprise that quite literally puts them into the minds of the liminals. In the vein of the True/False Film Fest mission, Liminals tests the boundary of documentary film, defining meaning and truth as separate in importance.