For the returning Maribou State, Brazilian filmmaker Giordano Maestrelli tells a story of lost love by employing some of the oldest techniques in cinema within a bold new structure. The subject of the film for All I Need is the complexity of a broken relationship, told through parallel timelines. At the centre of the story is a couple - their past life unfolds through fragments and the present plays out in the background where their lost love echoes. And to allow the flashback story of the couple's love affair to coexist within the present, Maestrelli built a custom zoetrope device inspired by early motion picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge.In this meticulous undertaking the director first shot the story on 16mm film, then printed into more than 2500 still frames, and re-sequenced it through the custom circular machine in a stop-motion-like technique. Shooting over 23 hours, thousands of delicate frames were replaced one by one while a crew member manually turned the machine at a millimetric degree, and another captured the action. The zoetrope enables one narrative to take place inside a contained, looping environment, which set out to resemble the way unprocessed emotions often linger. Meanwhile, behind it, the same setting appears as a ghostly representation of what is no more. With a visual language rooted in early cinema but a vision firmly fixed on today’s music video aesthetics, All I Need is a technically-daring love letter for the song that features on Maribou State’s latest album Hallucinating Love, their first since a multiple-year long hiatus following bandmember Chris Davids’ rare and debilitating brain illness. The result is a mesmerising and haunting blend of cinematic craftsmanship, memories and emotion.
Promonews - 4 days ago