Report isn’t quite about that, but it is a sort of filmic analogue of it. The central event, in this case, is the assassination of JFK. Video footage of JFK in his car is shown…then the screen collapses through a sequence of glitches into abstract flickers and finally pure blackness. Over everything, audio recordings detail the event. It’s built up as something dreadful and momentous. More video footage of JFK in his car is shown…again and again, as if time is out of joint, as if this moment weighs down on all others, inescapably. We see a countdown, the kind that precedes the beginning of a film, but it just repeats, never reaching its endpoint. A flurry of footage follows: a bullfight, parades and war scenes, buildings and flags, advertisements, Frankenstein, mushroom clouds and the statue of liberty, a lightbulb bursting in slow motion and a boy falling out of a pool. All these entirely dissimilar scenes, images of Americana, images of film, images of alternative flows of time, are entangled with the assassination, ineluctably colored by it. Everything is viewed in terms of that one event. It claws everything toward itself, and it won’t let go.
It’s a powerful movie. It should be seen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeI_25S3YqY
Tags: avant garde, favorites, life events, movies
