Outlandish - strange foreign bodies
Director Phillip Warnell
Countries
Duration 20 min
Synopsis
Philip Warnell’s short second film involves two actors: philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and an octopus. Nancy is sitting at his desk at home and is telling us and reading us about the body and its states, its strangeness, obviousness and impenetrableness, through eight chapters. As for the octopus, it moves its eight limbs along the panes of the aquarium where it is kept, on the deck of a crewless ship which it seems to be piloting from a distance. Between the scenes with those two protagonists, we get to see the process of an organ transplant. In his previous film, The Girl with the X-Ray Eyes (FID 2008), Warnell explored the possible or sometimes supernatural and impossible relationship between vision and the inside of bodies, and intended to exploit the gift of a young psychic from Moscow. This time, Warnell is driven by a similar questioning, but it expends the realm of his cinematographic inquiry, first towards animality, and second towards the other’s geography, or even geopolitics. True, Nancy’s lavish, dense and tortuous analysis decides upon the rhythm of the film, because it is mainly transmitted through the body of a language. But never does it rule pictures or make them slaves to an illustrative scheme. Conversely, two dances echo each other, differ or connect: one is the dance of language, of some ongoing thought incarnated in a body that is responsible for expressing it; and the other is the dance of a mute animal moving about like some code’s figures, trapped in a transparent prison. Both dances show in their own way the paths to a motionless odyssey.
Philip Warnell’s short second film involves two actors: philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and an octopus. Nancy is sitting at his desk at home and is telling us and reading us about the body and its states, its strangeness, obviousness and impenetrableness, through eight chapters. As for the octopus, it moves its eight limbs along the panes of the aquarium where it is kept, on the deck of a crewless ship which it seems to be piloting from a distance. Between the scenes with those two protagonists, we get to see the process of an organ transplant. In his previous film, The Girl with the X-Ray Eyes (FID 2008), Warnell explored the possible or sometimes supernatural and impossible relationship between vision and the inside of bodies, and intended to exploit the gift of a young psychic from Moscow. This time, Warnell is driven by a similar questioning, but it expends the realm of his cinematographic inquiry, first towards animality, and second towards the other’s geography, or even geopolitics. True, Nancy’s lavish, dense and tortuous analysis decides upon the rhythm of the film, because it is mainly transmitted through the body of a language. But never does it rule pictures or make them slaves to an illustrative scheme. Conversely, two dances echo each other, differ or connect: one is the dance of language, of some ongoing thought incarnated in a body that is responsible for expressing it; and the other is the dance of a mute animal moving about like some code’s figures, trapped in a transparent prison. Both dances show in their own way the paths to a motionless odyssey.