Doreo Alaska

Alaska “ALASKA is an emigration film, a dream of myself, the consequences of the act with society.” (Dore O.) 1968, 16mm, color/si, 18m, for rent from Canyon Cinema, Inc., San Francisco for US $55

“Could be that you would like this film which poses no language problem. The sound is just electronic noises, no language. To my mind, a painter (or poet) could have done this film. It has a very quiet rhythm accelerating somewhat towards the end, with interspersed irritating glimpses at paintings (a tiger head, a little girl’s face, people in front of the yellow tiger painting, a man’s face, the shadow of hands in front of the camera, etc.) interrupting the flow of water, waves, the coast – sometimes the coast UPSIDE down, sometimes greenish, sometimes photographed with a sepia-colored filter in front of the lens, the flow some archaic symbol of life perhaps, of streaming elements (the flow of data in our consciousness, in dreams?); there are other shots where this element of motion is contrasted with slabs of concrete piercing out of the screen, their thrust towards us, hard and with well-defined corners; again there are shots of persons (almost always a young woman) running at the beach, sometimes walking very slowly, as if in (again) a dream, down a pier, into a landscape of silence, of loneliness; the sea seems to be filled with ice floating, as she walks down the pier, we see she has already left it, seems to walk on into the lonely landscape, the distinction between pier and beach or sea has been wiped out, at least it has become blurred, she gets lost walking on the water, disappearing in the distance where there is a cut and the next sequence begins. At another time we see her walking down the pier, and at the same time,

she moves in the other direction too – superimposition as a means to show the contradicting (psychic?) forces tearing at “us”? There are images of the girl floating, as in a painting by Chagall where two lovers float up in the sky; here there is such closeness, the dream is one of being alone; still it is about an experience of weightlessness, a quiet experience. (Andreas Weiland)