Not much happens in João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva’s short film of two parrots. And that’s partly the point. Like all of the Portuguese duo’s films it’s shot in 16mm so that the resulting silent footage, reduced to slow motion, is intensely beautiful, and encourages concentrated viewing. Gradually, as the outlandishly plumed birds slowly flap or bob before the camera, you realize how strange and alien they seem, the saturated splendour of their feathers appearing almost unnatural.
But, then, what is ‘natural’? That’s the question asked over and over, in all sorts of different and captivating ways, by the dozens of other films you encounter in the main space, most similarly playing at various degrees of slow motion. There’s experimental footage of chimpanzees, films of rainforest trees being chainsawed, sequences showing metal being smelted – all beamed simultaneously across different walls, their projectors whirring away in the darkness. The main aim is to demonstrate how states we think of as normal are actually only temporary, how our sense of reality is shaped by our own limited, anthropocentric perspective. One film, for instance, depicts a spinning, blurred bicycle wheel – before the camera itself starts rotating, rendering the wheel suddenly visible while the surrounding world whirls madly.
In some of the films, themes of artifice and representation begin to seem slightly too forced, and sometimes you feel the artists are trying to illustrate too many diverse ideas within a single room. Whereas the most effective films aren’t illustrative at all, but simply speak for themselves, as with the astonishing footage, shown in a separate cinema space, of an African voodoo ceremony, its participants ecstatically escaping from their normal, ‘natural’ selves.
Gabriel Coxhead