Au bord du lac

"Au bord du lac" takes place namely at the surroundings of a lake. All sorts of sports and activities, familial, lonesome, adult or childish come into focus in this unique experimental short, but in an unexpected way: the image is distorted, by what at the beginning seems either digital means or multi-prismatic lens, yet is more likely to be a sheet of metal with slight bumps. And if this seems to either take all the magic of the image or an insistence on a secondary matter, yet figuring out this aspect of the image, its puzzling materiality is part of the game and the pleasure. I reveled in some abstract tableaux, almost still or in motion, evoking the grand traditions of painting, and ranging from the texture inside the head from Magritte's "The Secret Double", to a cubism in motion after Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d' Avignon". The bouncing soundtrack was fitting and quite evoking. A wholesome work of art.

This short film captures people at leisure in a park; rowing, riding horses playing ball games. All of these scenes are captured through distorted lenses (presumably), dappled in various ways, causing shapes and colours to distort, appearing to shrink and grow as the figures move. The effect is somewhat akin to Umberto Boccioni and Antoni Gaudi's artwork, but rather one dimensional as the figures don't transform in any particularly interesting ways and one can clearly make out the reality of the action behind the gimmick, so the effect soon becomes predictable, a facile experiment rather than anything of lasting interest. The accompanying music of plucked strings throbbing sounds compliments the action well, but I don't believe there's anything noteworthy to commend the film.