Mounting Tension

Escape, Mary Ellen Bute’s first color film, tells a story in abstraction of an orange/​red triangle imprisoned behind a grip of vertical and horizontal lines under a sky-blue expanse, perhaps representing freedom. J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor adds dramatic tension to the visual variables in motion.

A television reporter runs her fingers over her face, performing a light facial massage to loosen up before going live – a moment that might read like an unwitting precursor to Nicolas Provost’s Plot Point (2007).

A running man, exhausted and near collapse, is superimposed over the enormous, disembodied red lips of a woman, who taunts and seduces him: ​“Come on, you can do it. Go a little further. Keep pushing. You’ve got to make it.” Deadline uses an economy of means to visualize the futile contemporary social struggle for promotion and power. Max Almy focuses on ​“the stress man feels in the urban environment,” using a range of digital video effects to stretch, compress, flip and fracture the image.

Images of sixteen men and women are shown, one by one, as they run on a conveyor belt against a black background. They appear to be in a complete void. The camera films the runners from all kinds of angles: sometimes from the front, from the knees up, then in profile or a focus on one of the limbs in close up. The heavy breathing of their exertions is audible. The tight close-ups of the limbs lend the moving body parts an almost abstract, mechanical character. The title suggests a narrative element, as though the runners are close on each other’s heels.

In 1976, groundbreaking collagist, sculptor and filmmaker Bruce Conner released his magnum opus, a 36-minute assemblage of U.S. government footage of the first underwater atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. To record the moment of detonation, the U.S. Army deployed seven hundred cameras – some of them high-speed cameras – on land, on sea and in the air. Shown from 27 different angles and in extreme slow motion, Crossroads reveals the highly aesthetic phenomena of elemental physical force: the fearful symmetry of the mushroom cloud with its cap of water vapour and debris sucked up into the stratosphere. 

Synthesizer pioneer Patrick Gleeson created the atmospheric soundtrack to the first part of the film, while the hypnotic score of the second part was composed for electric organ by seminal minimalist musician Terry Riley.