Screenings at the Nasher, 3/12/2017

    I can only speak for myself, although I would imagine everyone does this to a degree, and that is the need or want to apply what we are seeing and/or hearing to something we have already seen or heard in order to retain it and react to it with predisposition. However, I am confronting that dilemma when observing these original concepts in film rather than merely seeking their contextualization--and with that said, Trento Symphonia (2014) and Engram of Returning (2016) were two films that took a while for me to process in completely varying ways.

    The collective work of Trento Symphonia and its organized movement of the orchestra depicted demonstrates the intricacy of the film’s intentions. The pleasing view of the group playing music in nature with a beautiful landscape, and how they slowly move in groups and then dissipate, gives a certain amount of tranquility with an underlying constant of contemplation. Obviously, this wasn’t something just slapped together with the bare minimum intent of a simple concept to get across to viewers, but rather it is much more complex and evokes some contemplation, while we are left to infer what else we want to take from it.

The contemplation I primarily interpreted from this film was the theme of existence, and how is it that we each co-exist together in our own realities as individuals, that somehow manage to exist wholesomely together with our own existence being our only perception. The members playing instruments and their “living-music-stands” slowly disappear and grow quiet as the sunsets on the mountains landscape, which both can naturally be compared to each other as the sound lessens and the light darkens, each coming to an end. All things must end, eventually, which also left me with a sudden feeling of doom as the film ended, resultantly thinking of the end of existence.

    The film Engram of Returning was much more elusive and less symbolic, at least from what I was able to honestly interpret. I appreciated the whimsical transitioning between the colors through potential filters or processes that I was not sure of, and the depicted landscapes each made me think something was eventually going to appear. Whether that suspicion was self provoked or from the film, the title did evoke some predetermined ideas of “what” was returning. The definition to “engram,” which I did admittedly didn’t know when watching, is: a hypothetical permanent change in the brain accounting for the existence of memory; a memory trace. Knowing this, I now take away from the film that it mainly involved the psychological effort to draw everything back to a memory, and that this returning of a mindset is reached through lucid clarity that makes things “click” when we understand something new in our own brains, and the process of doing so.