Zone

I watched this back to back with another well-known Takashi Ito short film, 1985's Grim, and I feel like Zone has a great deal more going on, is more engaging, but is also perhaps more confusing. Grim just seemed to create a certain atmosphere and then spend a whole bunch of time in it, and maybe others could pick up on what it was trying to say, but I couldn't. There's more variety to Zone and strands that could suggest more of a story, too, and I think for that reason I liked it a good deal more. There was simply more to be confused by, and while it was just as bewildering, it was an overall more visceral and notable experience for me at least.

Zone starts off with some scenes in the outdoors which are dream-vivid and curiously empty: a park from which paths unexplored lead away, a flood control channel, some empty buildings. There are no people, but there are heightened natural sounds.

Stills from these scenes become an organic cluster of framed photos beneath a wreath. The photos are on a wall in an odd room with strange diegetic lighting (lighting effects produced by visible light sources), and a chequered black and white floor. The unnerving effect is strangely reminiscent of that produced by the room "Beyond the Infinite" in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The film is about memory and perception although the exact points being made aren't obvious, and I've treated it as a mystic experience. Technically-speaking we aren't in contact with the real world, what we see around us is merely images as if looking at the screen of a closed-circuit TV system. If you don't believe me touch your eyes when they are closed, the colours you will see aren't actually there (they are pressure phosphenes), and then you can also see things that aren't there - your memories. Ito's movie retreats into the CCTV room, with it's strange sodium-yellow-lit corners and garish pulsating almost jellyfish-like flower bouquet.

There's an odd Beuys-ian train set shot in time lapse, bandaged up and whizzing round a simple track. An egg timer on the desk, also bandaged, empties quickly. There are two figures in the movie, one tied down, another covered in lights and moving around. Sometimes the light effects are astonishing, perhaps meant to represent neuronal firing.

Entropy is present, the pictures are seen through a mirror, the surface of what I was seeing distorted.

In the end I found the movie quite upsetting and nihilistic, perhaps what it is, is an epistemological horror movie.