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What better way to spend Valentine's Day than by watching a slow-burn breakup film? Whether or not you are in love, with or without a date, NOTES ON FILM 02 should be of interest for its sheer daring and originality - you won't have seen anything like it. A major discovery at the Diagonale festival in Graz, Austria (with some proclaiming it the Austrian film of the year), Norbert Pfaffenbichler's feature debut draws its inspiration from Robert Frank's 1963 short film O.K. END HERE, about a relationship on the rocks in a Manhattan apartment. Transposing the story to an indistinct Modernist mecca, lengthening it by more than an hour and, most radically, editing the whole thing based on mathematical equations derived from his digital editing software programme, Pfaffenbichler creates an unprecedented clash of film-video language within what would otherwise have been a traditional narrative framework. Thus, Antonioni's detachment meets Final Cut Pro meets Fibonacci. The metric structure of the film recalls the rigour and headiness of Peter Greenaway's work, but NOTES, which could have just as easily been called “26 Slight Variations on an Image,” risks a Warholian sense of bewilderment. The black-and-white digital cinematography by experimental filmmaker Dariusz Kowalski is precise and beautiful, while the digital blue screen is both alarming in its supposed incongruousness and calming in a Derek Jarman BLUE kind of way. In spite of its conceptual nature, NOTES ON FILM 02 is exceedingly moving. We suggest bringing a date. - Andréa Picard
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