Above and beyond any narrative, the Pica Towers trilogy depicts a bleak world.
The effect comes from emptying the experience of the sounds of humanity and inserting wind, occasionally, but mostly just amplifying the sounds of the movements that happen and making them echo into the lifeless surroundings.
The sounds hold hands with the visual. Color doesn’t seem to exist in this void home of rusted steel. Cold, hard steel. Dry steel. It looks really dry in this no man’s land.
I felt like I had to crank the cold, hard, rusted steel gears of my brain in order to decipher this world before it could make a story out of the movements. It took a second viewing of both Pizza and Hounds and a third viewing of The Good News before I could carve something out of the abstractions that made sense.
It took some effort to digest these films because they were off the beaten track of film standards. I think that is such an important thing to have happen to consumers of media. If we don’t remind ourselves of remarkably unusual strategies, we will succumb to boredom. And a spiceless existence sure to end in depression.
I know it’s hard for me not to reject things that are different. It’s easier to scoff and move on. But I usually find that if I give something like this a shot I can end up with a refreshed creativity and new outlook. I hope this is something others figured out more quickly than I have, but I’m afraid our tendency is to live without questioning the norms.
Anyhow, life lesson aside, once I could access the storylines, I found the little hunks of metal to have motives and hopes and fears that I could relate to. The creator did this with symbols from our world of leashes and crosses and pizza. And by giving the little hunks human features like widening eyes.
Film for thought for sure.