Extreme jumpcut cinema, making a dubby hash of its would-be monologues. Strobey, glitchy, overlapping audio and video, cutting against any sort of rhythm, like an Autechre album of a movie. Video, and videos of video. Much of what audio survives is soft-spoken poetry and college students having deep discussions about economic theory. Once I realized this wasn’t going to come together for me as a narrative, I wondered if it might’ve been a Begotten thing, where he made a film of his friends and relationship problems and it didn’t come out well so he destroyed it. But then, it was one of Cinema Scope’s top ten of 2015, so there must be more to it.
… each relationship available to the cinema must be rebuilt; nothing will be taken for granted within the frame. If there are narratives, they will not be simply given and accepted; they will appear as the product of careful study of the relations of the world, which Medina examines and expresses through the logic of rhythms.
It’s not just a restless critic reading too much into a semi-documentary Begotten breakbeat – in the interview, Medina is full of references and philosophy on the nature of his cinema, so I think I was too tired and undervalued the thing. They’re both mentioning the Lumiere brothers, who also come up in Dawson City and In The Intense Now. I cannot quote from the interview, because if I was too tired then to get what the film was going for, I’m definitely too tired now to get what these two are on about. I liked Michael Sicinski’s explanation of the thing:
There are fragments of an ostensible narrative. Or perhaps it is better to say, there are figures whose affect and experiences we observe across the running time of Medina’s film. They bob in and out of our view—a coterie of young Filipino-Canadian friends and lovers, given to creativity and anger and philosophizing and confusion. But 88:88 does not adhere to any given point of view. It hangs out, but in a jittery, caffeinated way, holding onto present moments without deadening them into connective tissue, mere “moving-towards.” Or, if there is a point of view, it’s that of “the digital image,” which is indiscriminate and regards a private breakdown with the same impassive fascination it affords greenish-yellow light through a treetop.