western 4.33
Aryan Kaganof
NSA Gallery | Durban
If you read Western 4.33 as a deconstructed documentary of modern Namibia – where the film is set – it is a remarkably astute creation.
A triptych based on John Cage’s silent composition 4’33”, the first segment features the camera lingering on a black man’s face and, in extreme slow motion, following a black woman walking down the street juxtaposed with stark black-and-white landscapes. In the second, silent, section, a grim photograph of skeletal Namibian victims of German concentration camps is overlaid with ribbons of text detailing the deprivations visited upon the native people by the colonisers, while the third component of the film is a 19-minute loop of the sun setting behind a barbed wire-encircled ruin shot in high-grain black-and-white, set to a mind-warping ambient soundtrack.
As a documentary, Western 4.33 breaks many rules and makes up a set of new ones along the way, challenging the genre with its fusion of anti-narrative and wrenching experiential elements. The story is told just as potently and you’re left with a far more visceral sense of ordeal than if it had been presented in traditional linear fashion. In this regard the obvious pretensions of the film’s execution are subsumed into its experience, rendering it a bold incursion of experimental art into the realm of orthodox documentary.
Alex Sudheim
this review originally appeared in art south africa vol.2 #3, 2002
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