Suddenly the lines stop mutating into boxes and I cry out loud, “The camera moved! I am in heaven!” but it turns out the camera did not move. The whole set moved on a truck and hydraulic lifts while the camera stayed still. The naked woman gets up and puts on a robe, answers the door and lets in some guy. They look everywhere for something, while a record plays (and scratches and skips because the set keeps moving). Finally she finds whatever they were looking for, and the camera rolls up onto the set housed in some unseen destruction vehicle with a plexiglass front (you can see reflections which I’m pretty sure were not part of my TV glare) and clumsily mangles the set. Finally drives through the back wall, which falls down to reveal sky…
Drum hit!
camera pans down a waterfall
Drum hit!
we are creeping through the underbrush
Drum hit!
camera follows a line of buildings sideways
Drum hit!
I fall asleep.
A few days later I watched a bunch more avant-garde films (shorter than this one) and started P. Adams Sitney’s avant-garde book, then returned to this, beginning when the wall falls and the montage part begins. I fell asleep again! Seen most of it by now, and I get the point, so I am quitting.
The short shots in the montage section continue, camera always panning (note: camera mostly pans, not moves, but there’s clearly some movement in there), one shot cuts into the next with a drum hit, sometimes matching the same motion as the previous shot, sometimes changing direction, but always in motion, imitating the gaze of the human eye, oooh. After an hour and thousands of pans, the last cut is to a pink screen that fades to red then black.