KALEIDOSCOPICS



Author: Stuart Pound,
Experimental, 9 min 23 s, DVCAM - Beta.
Orig. title: Kaleidoscopics.
Country: England, 2001.

Who does not remember the simple toy that used to excite our imagination and entertain us with its colourful patterns when we were children. The main magic of the kaleidoscope lies in its ability to create geometrical patterns, a firework display of constantly changing colours and shapes from simple parts of coloured glass.

Today it is just as easy to use a computer programme to change fragments of pictures into Kaleidoscope images, which change realistic pictures into abstract patterns. This possibility was used by Stuart Pound in his film Kaleidoscopics. With the aid of a computer he changed pictures of a female body, flowers and bubbling boiling water into constantly changing patterns. Even though computer processing changes the images so that they are hardly recognisable, the patterns which are constructed from parts of a flower give a gentle impression, the parts from boiling water are dynamic and sharp, while the parts of the women’s body create abstract patterns with an erotic charge, even though we know that it is a pornographic photography only if we read the authors synopsis of the film.

The basic form of the kaleidoscope picture is a triangle which composes a hexagonal pattern, which is of a round shape and reminiscent of a mandala. At the film Kaleidoscopics this comparison is also valid because the picture is accompanied with an oriental sound, typical for India. While watching the film we are reminded of a tantric mandala, sexual symbols, typical for Indian religious iconography, of the Kama Sutra and of the famous Konarak temple. We would find it hard to ascribe such complex contents to the film, for it is mostly a game of patterns, rhythms and sounds, however, it can be understood also in such a sense.

The circular form of the mandala as a universal symbol can also be found in the Western visual arts. We can also find it in films, especially experimental films. In this sense the most famous are the abstract films by the American author John Whitey, who created the first experimental computer films in the 1960’s. The abstract pictures in his films often have the form of a mandala, and his films Yantra and Lapis are also thematically bound to Eastern mysticism. A kaleidoscopic picture can be created on film also without the use of a computer, merely by using special lenses or by the use of mirrors. This is how Dušan Makavejev used a kaleidoscopic picture in his famous film WR – Mystery of an organism, in which he, with the help of a kaleidoscope achieved that a pornographic image became acceptable also for showing in normal cinemas.

The kaleidoscopic treatment hides the realistic content of the realistic picture by cutting it into fragments, however it at the same time also emphasises it on a metaphorical level by multiplying these fragments into a repeating pattern. The film Kaleidoscopics takes full advantage of this fact, even though the final impression is more decorative then dramatic.

Review: Tone Raèki