High Tide

High Tide hypnotically fixes its gaze on a landscape that’s either prehuman or postapocalyptic, but definitely a timeless arrangement in shades of gray — Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Stiff, dry and dully gleaming like damp tar, they tear a hole between the dark, gloomy sea and the grayish sky. As the minutes pass, the gaze itself becomes the focus of attention and Marxt creates a thoroughly insistent presence of the camera’s eye, the frozen rigidity of which produces an infinite number of each filmed movement, no matter how minute. The unfathomable, gloomy elegance of this splashing and rumbling landscape painting — the movement of the waves, the circling of the birds, the lifting of the cloud cover — is followed by an arc shot resembling a brushstroke that tells us about everything we have already forgotten while gazing at the static and precisely framed mountain: the world beyond the image. A moment of complete disorientation is created by the landscape’s sheer endlessness and a relationship between the point of view and the perceived movement of the camera and waves that seemingly cannot be reconciled. In High Tide the film’s two types of movement — in the image and that of the gaze itself — have been carefully separated and placed in succession in an almost didactic manner. At the same time, the film draws a mental line — from the subject of landscapes in Romanticism to the sweeping gaze of someone at an outlook to the filmic image that captures movement. High Tide represents evidence of a landscape and the possibility of virtualizing it in film anywhere in the world (again and again). And also: painting tending to the abstract in motion, the application of a brush (or a tremendously rigid caméra stylo) and the drawing of a line, the time it takes to fill the screen.

(Alejandro Bachmann)

Orig. Title
High Tide
Year
2014
Countries
Austria, Germany
Duration
8 min
Director
Lukas Marxt
Category
Avantgarde/Arts
Orig. Language
No Dialogue
Downloads
High Tide (Image)
High Tide (Image)
High Tide (Image)
Credits
Director
Lukas Marxt
Concept & Realization
Lukas Marxt
Available Formats
Digital File (prores, h264) (Distribution Copy)
Sound Format
stereo
Frame Rate
25 fps
Color Format
colour
DCP 2K flat (Distribution Copy)
Sound Format
stereo
Frame Rate
25 fps
Festivals (Selection)
2014
Graz - Diagonale, Festival des österreichischen Films (Diagonale Award for Innovative Cinema)
Wiesbaden - exground on screen
Kassel - Dokumentarfilm- & Videofest
Zagreb - One Take Festival
2015
Weimar - back-up festival. new media in film