western4.33
In Western4.33 we find outlined the terrible counterpoint between the tragedy of a near past and the inexorable forgetfulness of the present, thus making actual the horror permanently fixed in the immobility of the past; in reminding us that the past is always present like an accusation.
Western4.33 is a study in persuasion, and one which involves the audience as much as the people on the screen; and it is a work in which the technique and the action are quite literally fused. Form and content, the thing expressed as opposed to the way of expressing it, on this occasion become quite meaningless terms.
Western4.33, if written as a novel, would certainly seem nothing like as audacious or challenging as it does on the screen. Subjective time, recurring time, the gradations of reality and experience, are nothing strange to the modern novel. But film can accomodate them more easily - or more suggestively; and since its essential ingredients are space and time it can manoeuvre in both at once, make both relative to its own purposes.
In giant steps (2005) Kaganof explores time and memory from a fixed point of reference. Here there is no fixed point, and consequently Western4.33 imposes its own time on the viewer.
The meaning of the film is not in some aphorism which you can bring out of the maze with you, but in the process of exploration, this containing of possibilities. Objective explanations can be sought but not imposed. We are being given not a comment on “reality” but a series of mirror images, with the idea that this is how we apprehend - not reality, for that goes beyond the film’s definition, but whatever it is we apprehend.
Kaganof has never definitively stated that Western4.33 is a recurring dream. His purpose was to show that the recurring dream pattern is the most convenient image to describe the structure of the memory and to facilitate its understanding. All apparent discrepancies become natural in such a pattern, where the dreamer (or day-dreamer) is more or less aware of his previous dreams, in which he already remembered some anterior dreams, and so on, as a mental corridor of mirrors.
Kaganof’s spectator is asked not to reconstruct a story coldly from the outside, but to live it at the same time as the characters, and from the inside.
-Immanuel Stammelman
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