Institute History
Description
In this haunting feature, director Weston Currie stages an intervention into habituated and supposedly natural ways of making meaning onscreen. In collaboration with Grouper, who provides an exquisite musical soundscape, he offers an extremely stimulating experience, as viable as it is unconventional.
Divided into four chapters that seemingly involve distinct settings and characters (for example, a young woman running track, an infant taking in visual phenomena), the film depicts these subjects in exquisitely layered aural and visual compositions, handily subverting expected narrative connections along the way. Indeed, searching for a traditional plot is missing the point and the pleasure of this film, where ambiguous visual figures and emotionally specific sound cues fairly curl around one another, overturning conventional structures where one usually punctuates the other. The result approaches that realm where the art object seems to breathe with a life of its own, hinting at the beauty and power that are the exclusive province of cinema.