Pilgrimage

There is the thrum and howl of something, a high metallic ringing. Before us images, certainly, but it takes a while to realise what we are looking at is snow. Snow underfoot, or more specifically not yet underfoot - snow before, around, our fixed perspective that of our cameraman, his shadow sometimes cast by streetlights where we can see it.

There are speech-like noises, disjointed somewhat, less so than the 'action'. This is stopmotionist, short bursts of nature, step, and film, and stop, and step, and step, and film, and stop, and step, all compressed and pushed to that frame frame frame frame flicker of film. At points one wonders if we are looking at fresh footage, or the same shot repeated - the few cues are not enough to generate certainty.

Timelapsian streaks, lights hanging like baubles, the spin and spin of the turning cameraman. What impression is created? There are religious overtones, literally so - a liturgy perhaps, a sermon? There is something that approximates music - the ear tries desperately to determine if it is Silent Night - there is a choir involved. Perhaps it is the snow that creates the suspicion of Christmas. Filmed in Montreal's Parc Lafontaine this 'pilgramage' feels more like an interminable martyrdom.

At times experimental short films can feel like funhouse mirrors, forcing us to watch, distorted, the act of watching itself. Like other abstract art there is, if one is lucky, a clue to intent in the title. In Pilgrimage then, there is a journey, but one is not certain if it is intentional that there is nothing at the end - no relic, no ruin, no miracle. It does feel odd to seek a silver lining and hypothesise a nihilistic atheism, but sometimes there are only Neitzchian impulses.