Lagado
Doris Dörrie, Süddeutsche Zeitung, München, May 20,1977
"So as to work more precisely while cutting, Nekes used 35 mm for this film. Seeing it in the cinema now, it is hard to imagine seeing it anywhere else. Lagado, an experimental film, a didactic project, a movie, is a film for real cinema as well. It is only there that one can experience it in all its intensity.
In roughly twenty sequences Nekes demonstrates the potential of direct sound and its relation to the moving images. In scenes, which remind one of the silent movie era, he replaces music, uses it again to create atmosphere or promotes it to a carrier of information that takes precedence over the images themselves. What is unusual here, however, is primarily the way in which direct sound is used and not so much its content. Language is reduced to its function as a means of communication: sentences and words are dismembered until they are incomprehensible. Then they are reassembled according to mathematical or musical patterns. Pauses, snatches of sentences and of words become grammatical components of a new optical/auditive syntax, the demonstration of which is never only an end in itself. A woman framed by two colossal cardboard heads repeats the same sentence for minutes on end, a sentence of which we understand no more than sounds and syllables. The rest was cut away.
It does not matter how much we know about the technical procedures involved, it still seems as if this woman can only stammer, gasping for words like a fish for air. We strain to understand her. A story develops in the mind of each individual viewer, and finally he does understand her: she is talking about silence. In perpetually new combinations of images and sound, both thrilling and entertaining, Nekes succeeds in making the viewer aware of the way his own perception operates, of the path from watching and listening to understanding. Almost as if for relaxation, Nekes then hurls him into an optical rush with images of extreme sensuality, a rush where language exists only as a by-thought to the pictures. The title of the film refers to Lemuel Gulliver, who, on one of his journeys, visits the Academy in Lagado, an institution where scientists were busy amongst other things with a plan to abolish words altogether, because in their opinion this would be 'extremely beneficial to health and time saving'. In his film Nekes does not do away with language, he uses it as a model that enables us to think along and to think on and to tell our own stories as well. With this he simultaneously creates the feeling that one can breathe freely in the cramped theatre - a cinema experience 'beneficial to health'. (Doris Dörrie, Süddeutsche Zeitung, München, May 20,1977).
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