Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:
But I’d like to turn, at least at the outset, to a consideration of the sheer artistry of Morrison’s film, how even though its pacing is entirely dictated by the inevitable facticity and specificity of the tick-tock of the film’s method (all Morrison has done is to expertly align the time-signatures of a wide array of simultaneously running cameras and then cut in and out amongst them, guiding the viewer’s attention across a shifting grid of all that simultaneity), it is still remarkable how many editorially flecked or at any rate consciously discerned and foregrounded themes nevertheless emerge.
The film observes the Aristotelian unities (of time, of place), its action framed as if by Sophocles himself—starting, in medias res, with the uncanny happenstance of how, zeroing in from outer space onto this one specific little block on Chicago’s South Side—the view (from the police surveillance tower) perfectly bisected by an intervening pole—a figure comes staggering into the scene and tumbling to the ground, and just then, at the very moment that death seems to engulf the body, a white gull goes gliding by (a wash of grace, as it were, as if carrying away that body’s soul).
more here.
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