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.