KliKt Reconsidering
“...a more challenging and forward-looking example of current cinema...a strong and distinctive work...”
It's been a few years since the experiment KliKt was completed. After a long journey through a couple iterations it came out and disappeared online just as quickly. Always past and future place rather than present, it's yet to really find it's audience.
Originally shot as a short silent film, it lived that way for a long time. After Trickery Mimicry was made and had it's run through festivals there was a question of what next.
It's unclear how the original footage of KliKt came to be re-watched, but at some point it happened. And with the clarity of Trickery Mimicry pushing it along, a new film was born from the ashes of the past. Something with more depth, richness of detail, and clarity of consideration.
Watching Camden Toy is revelatory. A one of a kind actor whose provided two uniquely brilliant characters for CyNar. It's difficult not to watch him; consider the thoughts he so wears on his sleeve without words or common tools of communication. It was impossible to not provide KliKt another opportunity. Impossible not to dive deeper down the rabbit-hole of a story so evasive and overwhelming.
It's a silent film by motivation, but not execution. With John R. Barner's brilliant score as the backbone and additional characters - as well as inanimate objects given focus as characters - providing surrounding motivations, KliKt became a portal to another universe. A vision of reality not so distant from our own, but just far enough to be unclear.
“I wish I knew, in one way, what to say, because part of the work’s strength it seems to me is a certain resistance to interpretation. I mean, sure, it’s lucid, and its narrative can be extracted, but more even than many - most? - movies, you seem to be trafficking in a certain spot where there’s no other way to say it. Like Lynch, or (one of my favorite films) Polanski circa Repulsion: it’s not so much ‘dream-like’ as a kind of pure land (mind?) scape.”
At the time of release there were those who followed what it was attempting to accomplish. People like Lily Emeralde and Emma Dyllan from Phosphorescence Magazine and Matthew Specktor who wrote wonderful thoughts and considerations that presented KliKt as something to be discovered.
There were also many supporters like Kathy McTavish who responded to the film with their own creative works as review of the experience. Offering reconsiderations entwined with the original considerations themselves.
For a time there was a place where all this material was located, but it's not really available anymore. And it should be. The film itself and the energy it instigated should be presented some way for people to find. So, we're collecting these things here. Maybe it will incite a revisiting. Maybe the life KliKt has yet to have can be found. The next couple posts will be responses to the film as written by others either involved in the creative act, like John Barner, or those who were on the front lines witnessing the development.
It's a chronicle of sorts. Value judgments of something before it reached any sort of conclusion. But, before you understand where all that is coming from, you should really just watch the movie.