Feature – UK, USA, Russia, Poland / UK Première

Showing @ Cineworld 12, Wed 27 Jun @ 18.50

Harmony Korine, Aleksei Fedorchenko, Jan Kwiecinski / UK/USA/Russia/Poland / 2011 / 106 min

The abstraction of the fourth dimension is something long since hunted for by artists – a reflection perhaps of mankind’s endless search for higher knowledge. Three films by three directors try to pierce through the void here, each offering a tale of eccentricity and frustration as their characters struggle to stretch the margins of time, space and consciousness.

Korine’s The Lotus Community Workshop sees Val Kilmer parade into his self-help seminar where he peddles some comical quick-fix answers and offers cryptic grandstanding to a collection of jobless, loverless locals. Fedorchenko’s Chroneneye follows experimental scientist Grigory Mikhailovich (Igor Sergeev) as he is driven to the brink of madness by his attempts to master time travel. And Kwiecinski’s Fawns involves four droogs enjoying some mischief after a town is evacuated due to an impending flood. All three directors seem concerned with a pantheistic view of the world, namely, how the beauty of the fourth dimension is connected to the cosmos yet surrounds us. This comes across as inane philosophising mostly however, as the films teach us nothing yet preach everything (‘The Fourth Dimension is Heaven on Earth’, claims Kilmer’s character). There is something to be said here, of extra-perception, of intellectual ideals, of Sartrean nothingness, but it’s simply lost in mundane storytelling which provides little illumination on such an obscure subject.