Lukas Marxt and Mirna Belina. Landscapes 3.0 at Sonic Acts 2015
Friday screenings of Lukas Marxt's short films
High Tide (2013) and
Captive Horizon (2015) reveal an artist whose intent to „capture time“ is inextricably related to the notions of space and movement. Vast open spaces of the Arctic and the Spanish island of Lanzarote – shooting sites for the two films – provide a seemingly frozen, unchanging landscape in which the flow of time has been slowed down to an almost imperceptible pace.
Fixing its gaze upon the impressive vistas of the Arctic mountains in
High Tide, the artist's camera invites the viewer to dive in and experience the immensity of time as it exists in nature, the so-called deep time. Surpassing the nervous turmoil of modernity and the human existence, it is embodied by huge stretches of slow geologic changes, challenging our senses and abilities of comprehension.
Filmed by a camera attached to a boat, Marxt's seven-minute answer to the challenge offers a view of the landscape in three layers: sky, mountains, water. It is a curious blend of stasis and movement: as the currents flow in one direction, it is hard to discern whether the camera is moving in the opposite direction or simply standing still and the movement is merely an illusion. It starts to feel like the artist is playing tricks on our senses. The mountains, the only truly static body on the screen, become the point of reference as their movement indicates that we are moving too. A low, steady hum of the boat intensifies, transposing us completely into the landscape in front of us. The mountains gradually exit the screen, the boat is moving. As linear movement becomes circular, the mountains disappear and reappear, sky and water merge and diverge. Through this subtle play with movement and perception, time becomes visual. And as the boat is turning, it might as well be humming: „time is movement is change is time is...“
Following right after
High Tide,
Captive Horizon continues to build upon the relation between the moving camera and its static subject. In order to shoot Lanzarote from the bird's eye view, Marxt used a drone. The physical removal of the filmmaker from the space we're observing and his replacement with a machine creates a sinister, strange feeling. Lanzarote's rocky landscape known for its sandy beaches becomes transformed into a barren post-apocalyptic place from which almost all signs of human existence have long been banished. Continuously moving in and out, closer to and further from the ground, the camera confuses our awareness of what we are seeing. There is nothing we can grab onto as a point of orientation. We don't know how far away from the ground we are. The sounds of walking on sand and stones and of flowing water hint at what it is that we are seeing. Distance has become completely relative and unknowable; we could be microscopically close to or miles away from the surface. The landscape is an unknown planet. As the landscapes change, we come upon a white surface. Lines run across it like capillaries. It is like an extremely up-close shot of a piece of stone. What in other landscapes looked like long-untraveled roads, here looks like natural crevices made over a large period of time – the last traces of human activity have been erased. And then the camera suddenly accelerates, white turns to red, we pan out and find ourselves above a rocky land, and continue to go even higher up. Geometric shapes appear, suggesting the presence of people, and that is where the film ends.
We are left with the uncanny feeling of disconnectedness and a dizzy awareness of the ability of time to surpass everything, slowly awakening from the dystopian fantasy.
