Lagado
Lagado
1977, 35/16 mm, color, 79 min.
Team: Werner Nekes, Dore 0., Bernd Upnmoor, Anthony Moore, Harm Abrahams, Götz Vincentz.
Cast: Susanne Kelterborn, Anna Pfeiffer, Marianne Käss, Dore 0., Annette Tews, Feli Jung, Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann, Dorle Stoller, Christian Rittelmeyer, Wolfgang Keckeisen, Rainer Ehrenberg
An experimental film about the interpenetration of various levels of communication, dealing with the relationship of the pictorial functions to those of sound (direct sound).
"…What sounds rather bookish and intimidating, in fact unfolds an enormous sensual stimulus on screen. In more than 20 sequences, based in part on work by Stifter and Camus, Hamburg's experimental film director and a number of students from Braunschweig and Göttingen demonstrate a higher school of hearing and seeing. With manipulations of sight and sound, which are at times highly complex and mathematically precise, he shows the tension between optical and acoustic elements, inventing ever new combinations from which an abstract poetry issues forth. Nekes works with single frame mechanism and multiple copying of the images, thus defamiliarizing the sound at the same time. The title of the film pertains to Jonathan Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels'. Lagado is the name of the academy in which scientists of the most diverse disciplines work at strange projects.” (Hans C. Blumenberg, Die Zeit, March 18, 1977 Filmtip “Excellent”).
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. (...) more...
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