Event

Dore O - Program Two on 16mm

KALDALON. 1970/1. 45 min.
BLONDE BARBAREI. 1972. 25 min.

Shot on a trip to a spectacular glacial lagoon in Iceland, KALDALON broadly expands the the scenographic overtures of O.'s first films while teasing out new subtexts of control and romance, bathing the viewer in gorgeous images that nonetheless fail to linger quite long enough. It's rumored that the film began as an attempt to recapture the Northern Lights on celluloid but it's also the first of O.'s shorts (since JÜM-JÜM, anyway) to use wall-projection as its own technique of superimposition. The camera works here as birdlike spectator, fastidious indexer, topographical scanner and with two discrete shots uneasily sloped together in the frame's center as a remarkable simulacra for human eyesight.

Shot in black and white but sepia-toned in post-production, BLONDE BARBAREI represents a partial test-run for what would become KASKARA, again engaging notions of spectatorship albeit shrouded in far darker context this go-round. A camera tenuously considers the world outside its paneled apartment windows, foregrounding a woman's silhouette (Dore's?) in its reluctant and never-voyeuristic sweeps of the lens.

Read more: http://www.spectacletheater.com/dore-o/