ITS EXISTENCE COMMENCED THIS HOUR
2019 · 1h 0m · Sweden
Directed by Wolfgang Lehmann
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
A one-hour structural cine-poem in which kaleidoscopic, rhythmically montaged images of Malaysia and Sweden dissolve into one another across a single continuous image.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Lehmann's doing the thing where he pretends experimental film is still transgressive by bolting together unrelated geographies and calling it poetry—and somehow it almost works, which is exactly why I don't trust it.
A genuine lineage piece: the structural rigor of Snow and Brakhage meeting the essayistic impulse of Farocki, where the continuous image becomes both formal constraint and philosophical argument about how we stitch disparate places into meaning.
The decision to hold that single continuous frame while Malaysia and Sweden flicker through it is the whole film—it's the one formal choice that transforms what could be lazy montage into something about persistence and dissolution, and Lehmann commits to it for a full hour without flinching.