Designed as a hospital for well-off patients, the Israel American Medical Center has been going up in Tel Aviv since 1968, but it has never been finished. The architect who designed this building is invited to re-visit his unfinished work and venture into what were to have been huge emergency wards, splendid private rooms for patients and well-equipped physicians' surgeries. The abrasive contrast between desire and reality and between expectations and frustrations is present in this film.
'in that sleep of death, what dreams may come' (Shakespeare).
Shot in varying live and object stop-frame formats, Jamais Vu depicts an individual's descent into his own madness, capturing the perverse poetry of insanity by using motifs of dream, blackout, amnesia and final annihilation. As we enter the opening dream, we witness the protagonist's (Antonio O) fall into the self-referential world of the Cellar, a place where objects seem to have their own malicious intent. Trapped within the unknown space, Antonio O struggles to hold onto some sense of his own self. He starts to have flashbacks of his forgotten memories which become so vivid that he can not handle any more and as he collapses, he regurgitates all of his memory into a book and breathes his last breath. Ultimately, though, we realise that the Cellar is the main protagonist.
The setting is the London Underground. The film passes through real places and transforms in and out abstract shapes and forms. The music and the images are presented as equal elements in balance and harmony with each other. The film was created using a unique production process with the director/animator also working as the score composer. The images were designed as a reaction to the music.
The poem Kissing in hats is a villanelle, a verse form where the regular repetition of two key lines gives added urgency to what is being said.
The effect is intensified here by double tracking of the speaker's voice, as a moving path scans a drawing of World War Two lovers kissing in hats
before the men must board their train. This is a new version with the text of the poem on screen.
Shot in 2006 in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the film tracks through the Near Eastern, African and Oceanic collections, offering fleeting glimpses of statues, bowls and historical artefacts.
Harmony and chaos meet in a mechanism of rythms and lights. The birth and death of a surreal environment in which familiar game-like rules drive the action's tightly synchronised evolution. A single oscillating dot becomes an abstract musical machine which plays itself using glowing orbs before exploding into particles which collapse together as the cycle completes.
