I’m pretty sure this movie is a masterpiece. It begins with a still shot of a watermelon on a patch of grass. The edges of the film are blurred like in those old-timey daguerreotype photos (as in The Assassination of Jesse James). There’s an old-timey song playing, in which a slave laments the death of his master, playing on the watermelon’s traditional role as a signifier of black people and good old-timey southern slavery.
Then everything starts disintegrating. There’s a flurry of scenes showing the watermelon in a variety of bizarre situations: it chases people down a street, falls out of a rocket, is sliced open and has animal organs pulled out of it, makes love to a woman (or vice versa), and is destroyed in any number of ways. This mirthful deconstruction of the watermelon’s traditional signification is accompanied by an analogous change in style. The old-timey music transitions into a droning, repetitious pattern of tones (composed by Steve Reich), and the editing and cinematography become almost frantic. Near the end, there’s a sequence of shots where the camera whips around so rapidly that the images are dissolved into abstractions reminiscent of Man Ray’s rayographs in Emak-Bakia. Then there’s a sequence of edits so rapid that it bests Eisenstein’s most audacious montages. I think I saw a crucifix in there somewhere, but it might have been a telephone poll.
Amazing stuff. The playing with symbols, as well as the use of music to keep things lively, reminded me somewhat of Scorpio Rising, which is one of my favorites.
Here it is on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvs0-nPNha8
