(This article previously appeared in Film International.)
Mustererkenntnis (Pattern Cognition) is a sensational abstract animated short, slightly over seven minutes, by Thorsten Fleisch. One could call it a “flicker film,” because it is distantly related to the genre of films which rapidly alternate single frames of black and white, which includes Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1960) and Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1966), if only because Mustererkenntnis also alternates rapidly from light to dark frames. But this film is more sophisticated in its exploration of the flicker effect by several orders of magnitude. It is related to the earlier flicker films in the sense that Finnegan’s Wake is related to Dubliners.
The earlier flicker films used frames which were either solid black or solid white, and the flickering effect, at 24fps, sometimes produced a sensation of colors. Mustererkenntnis, by contrast, is entirely in color, and it runs at a breakneck speed of 60fps, creating a sensation of hyper, super, ultra color, overlaid by complex patterns in black and white, as well as dizzying illusions of movement, and possibly a sensation that you are somewhere in a distant universe.
Unlike a viewer in a film festival, I watched this film at home, on QuickTime Player, and so I got to cheat, by occasionally stepping through sections of the film frame by frame, and so I was able to discover the secret mechanics which lie behind the film’s dazzling effects. What do the individual frames look like? Random patterns of colored blotches, lozenges, and dots, which at first simply look like color noise but also appear as blurred, colorized images of dense shrubbery. Examined frame by frame, I could see the secret behind the remarkable depth effects of Mustererkenntnis, where the viewer always feels as if he is falling into the screen or else rushing away from it. Each of the individual frames consists of color blobs on several superimposed layers, at different depths. These layers-within-the-frames change over time: rotate, expand, contract, or simply change randomly, and the front layers aren’t changing on the same frames as the middle layers and the back layers. This creates a subliminal sense that different aspects of the image are moving in different directions and at different speeds, all at the same time.
We aren’t used to seeing movies at 60fps, which is usually only seen in interlaced American broadcast TV. When we watch a film at this frame rate, a film where every single frame is radically different from the previous one, it seems to push our brains towards the absolute limit of our ability to take in information. Our senses are poised on high alert, and we realize that we are hovering just on the horizon of vision, where everything is on the verge of collapsing into a blur.
The soundtrack is doing something analogous to the images, but only in a general sense. Embedded in a sea of harsh, grating noise, we hear chords and fragments of music, and these chords appear to be drifting downwards or lazily rising in pitch.
The final section of the film is transcendent. Suddenly, the individual frames are no longer filled with complex blobs of color, but with simple color field compositions, reminiscent of Rothko paintings. This relative simplicity, combined with larger areas of color, makes the flicker feel as if it is directly emotional and uplifting. It is very difficult to describe what this section does to your eyeballs, except to say that it produces a fantastic illusion of throbbing, interlaced octagons, triangles, snowflakes, and lattices, none of which are actually “there” in any of the individual frames.
The real secret to this film, and to all of Fleisch’s films, lies in his artistry. On a simple level, his highly abstract films are entertaining. They’re fun to watch, because they constantly present the eye and the ear with new patterns and ideas, in a way that feels simultaneously logical and surprising. They develop according to a musical logic. This goes a long way towards explaining why his films have long been popular with audiences in festivals, even audiences who aren’t used to watching abstract films.
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