It begins with a meditative, vibrating drone in the dark auditorium and ends with a word scratched onto the film strip: REFLECT – an invitation to viewers to think about what they have seen, but also the description of one of the many techniques used by David Larcher in his two-and-a-half-hour experimental film epic. Such dual and multiple meanings are a recurring motif in the film, as is the desire to decipher the foundational structures of cinematic perception. There is a fascination for the psychedelic expansion of consciousness and for the complex web of relationships between experience and memory – the film can be read as both a hippie-esque, elliptical diary film as well as an encyclopaedia of experimental image systems.
“Mare’s tail” is the term used in England for elongated, fraying clouds resembling a horse’s tail that herald a coming rain. And just as one must learn to first see this symbol and then interpret it, David Larcher teaches us cinematic seeing in a kind of creation story of visual representation, which is at the same time a section of the director’s own history, bathed in the period colours of late 1960s.
by David Larcher United Kingdom 1969 Without dialogue 160’ Black/White & Colour

Crew

Written and Directed by David Larcher
Cinematography David Larcher
Producer Alan Power

Produced by

Q Production

David Larcher

Born in London in 1942. He studied Palaeolithic Archaeology and then Film and Television. Larcher began to take photographs and make films in the 1960s. From 1996 to 2007, he was professor for Video Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM).

Filmography

1975 Monkey's Birthday; 360 min. 1983 View through the Aquarium of the (Ich Tank Durchblick); 5 min. 1987 EETC; 69 min., with Mike Stubbs et al., Forum 1987 1989 Granny's Is; 50 min., Forum 1990 1993 Videøvoid: The Trailer; 33 min. 1996 Videøvoid: Text; 36 min. 1998 Ich Tank; 59 min.

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2020