PIOTR KAMLER DELICIOUS CATASTROPHE (1971)

Director: Piotr Kamler

Year: 1971

Time: 12 mins

Music: Robert Cohen Solal

Eye of Sound: Polish animation giant Piotr Kamler is one of those artists who seem to obsessively return to the same themes and problems regardless of the necessary outer diversity of their work. In Kamler's case, the obsessions revolve around issues of existential and cosmogonical significance: time, repetition, fracture, creation, nothingness and the nesting of worlds within worlds. Délicieuse Catastrophe is one of his most intriguing and narratively hermetic works. Once again, Kamler collaborated with a GRM electroacoustic musician - Robert Cohen Solal in this case, whose beautiful soundtrack, oscillating between moments of sheer throb or repetition and deranging passages of freewheeling sonic burst, is as essential to the unfolding of the narrative as the director's enigmatic eyescapes. There's a pulsating rhythm that animates the world, a pounding ball that punctuates existence in its most monotonous cycles of repetition and apparent meaninglessness. Inside the ball lies the dimension of temporality and existential isolation, as if time is the condition for the breaking up of reality and the multitude of sensible forms. Once we have crossed diverse worlds, we reach an isolated platform in which our "character" lives, suspended over a red liquid of some sort. He moves back and forth, immersed in a series of repetitive tasks he himself probably doesn't understand, but of which he seems to want to escape. But he fails, alas, as there's no obvious escape from this dimension, and eventually returns to his monotonous existence. All of a sudden, however, a break occurs: something apparently created out of dirt is cast through the looking-glass and the mechanical cycle of repetition is shattered; the music of the spheres is now out of tune and we see our hero flying through a series of forms which quite clearly suggest female allures. An intruder, of the same shape we had initially seen encompassing our character's world, is now living in his previously lonely platform. He picks a horn to entice the mysterious intruder with its music and something unprecedented happens: they now both delight in its beautiful tones, and monotony has been broken. As if commanded by a higher voice, the man tries to return to his quotidian pointless tasks; but the intruder won't let him, craving for more music and delight. The hero complies, initially unaware that he is undermining the order of things. In the frolic of this newly-found meaning, the clock he carries on his neck is replaced by the same red liquid that now seems to boil around his platform. A deluge will follow, on which the artist will float, creating with his magical horn countless new worlds. The mechanicity of the cosmos has collapsed, and the thaumaturgical horn player now delights in his own creations. Whether through the presence of the previously encompassing female figure that invaded his platform or through his own creative power (which may, after all, be one and the same thing), he has escaped from the servile cycle of repetition that defined his vain existence.

- DEDICATED TO MR. LUCKY AND THE GLUCKLICH FAMILY - 

Délicieuse Catastrophe