'Sidewalk' by Karl Kels

The following extract from my Film Review notebook concerns the short film by Karl Kels, Sidewalk, which I saw at the European Media Arts and Film Festival in Osnabrueck, Germany in 2009. Coinciding with the Urban Drift section of the festival, I was able to make links with this 'cinematographic painting' to my own work that involved the moving image to understand a sense of place.

(Still from Sidewalk, 2008)

The simple composition of the shot highlights the movements of the human beings across the screen and asks the viewer to question the everyday actions each of us perform; from parking our cars to walking our dogs. It is the actions of those around us that transform our decisions and movements, ultimately shaping our perception of our surroundings and of those we share it with. We are all lone pedestrians, wandering the endless sidewalks and experiencing the everyday with a blasé attitude. Psychogeography touches upon the idea of experiencing the everyday with precious wonder, experiencing all that is found banal as a chance to savour the wonders of man's creations.

On public transport, which throws them against one another with statistical indifference, people assume an unbearable expression of mixed disillusion, pride and contempt - an expression much like the natural effect of death on a toothless mouth. The atmosphere of false communication makes everyone the policeman of his own encounters. The instincts of flight and aggression trail the knights of wage-labour, who must now rely on subways and suburban trains for their pitiful wanderings. If men are transformed into scorpions who sting themselves and one another, isn't it really because nothing has happened, and human beings with empty eyes and flabby brains have 'mysteriously' become mere shadows of men, ghosts of men, and in some ways are no longer men except in name?

We have nothing in common except the illusion of being together.

Extract from The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem

(Page 30, Chapter 3, 'Isolation')

The following video was made in 2008. It was supposed to be a shot that was to be used in Robinson in Cardiff (see The Shadow of Robinson blog) but, having dropped the camera over the side of a bridge in Bute Park, it became a 'cinematographic painting,' with the constant shot of reeds slightly waving in the wind giving an image that highlights their overlooked existence. The movement of a small bug across some of the leaves suggests the level of open minded acceptance to the sometimes banal acceptance of nature's beauty. As an accidental piece of film work, this was never shown as a piece to fellow students. However, using it to back my understanding of Karl Kels attempts to unknowingly relate film work with psychogeography, I am able to apply and formulate this acknowledgment into my own production of films.

Four Minutes of Stress from Lucy Thompson on Vimeo.