“Life, though… Flies at us in Bright Splinters”

The 2012 Korsakow film ‘Bright Splinters’ (http://vogmae.net.au/classworks/media/2012/kfilms/brightsplinters/) opens with this quote from David Shields, talking about how the world is not a whole entity, but an amalgamation of a great many things, a chaotic cornucopia of neverending stimuli. This theory can be seen in many Korsakow films, which by nature present an alternative form of narrative that refuses to present its content as coherent and predictable. Bright Splinters plays with this format, as well as the views of David Shields, to create a pattern of fragmentation. We get presentations of the world in bits and pieces, often sped up to separate it from a normal panorama.

The first clip highlights a busy road from above, the headlights of cars shooting past in a manner that calls attention to the title of the project, as well as the quote that gave it its name. The music is a twinkling melody that is reminiscent of rain or flickering lights: more fragments and pieces, strung together in an attractive way.

The interface is minimalistic: a black background with the interactive videos and thumbnails centred in a landscape arrangement. The main SNU, three preview thumbnails tall and three wide, is in the bottom left, and a total of seven previews are arranged along the top and right-hand sides of the video. When moused over, the previews will play their linked videos in black-and-white, but when clicked on the SNU will play it in colour.

The content emphasises light, colour, movement and time. Some feature wide shots of cities and busy streets, traffic moving under the glowing yellow and blue fluorescent. Sometimes the videos are abstract portions of larger objects, often light-sources themselves, and often they are slowed down or sped up to emphasise the movement of the objects within the frame. A notable series of videos features exploding fireworks being projected behind subjects, either the video itself reversed or the projected image. This creates a spontaneous and mesmerizing display of light and colour, which contradicts the movement and logical progression that we would normally expect. Lines of bright blues, yellows, greens and reds shoot across the frame, meet in a single place and flash, illuminating the subject for a brief moment, before withering to a dim dot which seems to fall away. There are at least seven of these videos, and their fragmented presentation of light recalls the ‘bright splinters’ the project is named for.

Fire is also played with, with videos of the eternal flame, candles and out-of-focus, non-descript fires. A flame could be seen as a chaotic pattern of light and movement, erratically dancing with no rhyme or reason.

Some videos have no or inaudible audio, while others have distinct voices or sounds that crash into the soundscape. This creates a distinct pattern of unpredictability, as there is little pattern between what videos are heard and which ones are not.

In all my time scouring the presentation, most of the videos continued to reappear, so I wonder if perhaps most, if not all, videos have an infinite number of lives within the film. This presents a pattern that never ends, constantly catching its viewer in a seemingly random barrage of stimuli. It’s notable that none of the videos loop either, staying always on the final frame of the clip as the same music continues to play in the background. This interface thus requires interaction to continue, even though common motifs of the film seem to be about spontaneity, unpredictability and – conversely – repetitiveness.

People frequently appear in the clips; workers, bystanders, as well as subjects posing for the video. Since Shield’s quote from the first video is about the unpredictability of life, then this is about life, and what would it be without people? How can we appreciate a chaotic world of light and constant movement without appreciating the vessels by which we perceive these stimuli?

So what does it mean? The opening quote implies that life is a thing of chaos, and the film seems to explore this. Light, from the repetitive flickering of fluorescent tubes to the random bursts of a firework, is brought to the forefront, sharing the space with movement, which presents itself randomly through dancing flames, and predictably through the gliding of a tram down a tram track. We see a pattern, constants; the interface remains consistent throughout the film. Previews are black-and-white, then become colourful. A calm song plays throughout the presentation. This only adds to the irregularity, as new and different clips – that sometimes have audio and sometimes don’t – are more noticeably weird or surprising. This seems to be a narrative about the human perception of life; of finding a pattern, however abstract, in the chaos of the world around us, in the light, the movement. We predict it, or attempt to predict it, even if it is random, and we are surprised – pleasantly or otherwise – when it doesn’t turn out the way we expect it to.