Sixty Six

Experimental films had their day before Andy Warhol shot movies in which nothing happened and art was still coming to terms with Jackson Pollock. The festivals loved them although the audiences didn't. They had cool cred.

Not anymore. If something like Sixty Six were 10 minutes long and repeated on a continuous loop it might have a chance with the Turner prize.

At first, during those opening 10 minutes, after a nostalgic Leonard Cohen number, you feel excited that at last there is originality up on the screen, an individual voice, an artistic statement of stunning bewilderment.

The bewilderment continues through 12 episodes for an hour and a half. Those good feelings become desperate feelings, like being beaten over the head with a faded memory.

Cut outs from Fifties comic books are used to nudge the ghost of a plot into the light. Other images from the period are laid bare, furniture, architecture, cooking utensils. Somewhere there is a connection, but it is not obvious, because there is no connection and there is no plot and there is no meaning.

Of course meaning is mainstream. In the world of the experimental film attitude and imagery evoke private passions. Well, not passions. Privacy.

In this private space, called Sixty Six, you have a choice. To watch, to sleep or to leave. The watcher searches for meaning, knowing that meaning is mainstream and therefore open to the public, not locked in private. This confusion can cause delirium. The sleeper abandons all attempts at understanding and drifts effortlessly into nothingness, knowing that nothingness is where it all began. The leaver feels superior. The leaver has escaped. When asked what it was that he escaped from the leaver is lost (for words).

Sixty Six will muzzle your mind and haunt your dreams. Even the leaver is afraid to remember.