DARIUSZ KOWALSKI ELEMENTS (2006)

Director: Dariusz Kowalski

Year: 2006

Time: 8 mins

Music: Stefan Németh

Eye of Sound: Although perhaps cruder in gesture and less lyrical in effect, Kowalski's Elements shares many technical and thematic affinites with Elke Groen's Nightstill. The protagonists are the same: the snowy uninhabitable landscapes, not of the Alps, but of the Alaska; the unflinching winds that daily sweep its vast plains and push cloud formations to their inevitable dissolution; the monotonous light cycles that cast an illusion of change on an unchanging eyescape; and the sometimes disturbingly illusory permanence of man-made and natural scenic objects immersed in a tumultuous and violent wash of transformation. The technical means used to articulate this beautiful study on landscape also bear similarities to Nightstill, resorting to an impressive application of time-lapse in order to inflict violent temporal dislocations on an otherwise placid picture. Unlike Groen's work, however, Elements does not venture into the field and uses footage taken from a website designed to observe the weather in Alaskan airfields: this lends it a much rougher quality but also a starker, unembellished perspective on the ice deserts. This starker approach is also reflected in Németh's soundtrack: grainy particles of sound that seem intended to emulate the violent clash of wind and dust against the camera only briefly give in to more "musical" drones that are immediately followed by figurative allusions to aeroplanes, wind hisses and control-tower voice-cracks.

ELEMENTS

DARIUSZ KOWALSKI ORTEM (2004)

Director: Dariusz Kowalski

Year: 2004

Time: 20 mins

Music: Stefan Németh

Eye of Sound: Ortem, or Metro read backwards, is one of the finest examples of Kowalski's permanent engagement with the visual study of non-places. Marc Augé coined the term to denote physical spaces devoid of relational, historical and identity traits: airports, highways, supermarkets, gas stations, etc. But these places do have relational, historical and identitary significance: just consider the lovers who part at the airport, or the family whose relative has been killed in a highway, and we are faced with strong social, historical and individual constructions of place and memory. In Ortem, Kowalski tries to explore the logic of the perception of space and time in a place which claims to be, he argues, nothing but an intersection in a traffic network or a bridge between different intersections. Traveling speed, perceived mostly by visual processes, poses specific questions about the cognition of time and space, as there is little to recognize in a subway tunnel. Time is thus bent in strange ways, and perhaps it could be argued, with some qualifications, that the time connecting two points in this place is some sort of non-time. As Kowalski argues, the metro station is, on the other hand, a direct reflection of cinema's dominance over 20th century thought: all things are aligned toward a vanishing point. But, as in Xenon's paradox, these points never lead to an end, and so the entire space is beyond intellection, eternally ungraspable. Stefan Németh's soundtrack adds to this sense of elusiveness, subtly merging field recordings and laptop soundscapes (fashionably labelled today as "microsound") but hardly ever trying to use sound as an illustration for the visual. The relation between sound and picture remains baffling as an initially apparent sonic topography of the subway gives way to less direct connections, further juggling memory and perception. A truly fascinating work.

http://rapidshare.com/files/395385586/ortem.avi.001

http://rapidshare.com/files/395385576/ortem.avi.002