BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2023 REVIEW!
There are two pairs of hands on the tiller here. According to the credits the film is directed by Mike Gibisser and Mary Helen Clarke. This is unusual and frustrating because I really loved this film but I don’t know who did what. I stress this because I care. A Common Sequence really inspired me.
A Common Sequence turns the whole documentary experience into a surreal feast. There is a sequence where a robot searches for apples. Its beady eyes are cheap glass, and its spine is a USB cable. Composed of a head for searching and an arm for picking, its movements nonetheless reflect the ghosts of billions of tree-bound souls. Then we see ranks of larger robots decimating an orchard like greedy vending machines. Their inventor poses with them and smiles, but apples have been dropped everywhere you look. These weird experiments with automation give perspectives on the birth of man as interesting as 2001: A Space Odyssey. Evolution is grafting the shape of the ape onto history once more.
The opening is a scorching beauty. We follow an ancient path down to a lake at night. The lo-fi of the filming lets the place occupy your senses. At the shore, Purepecha Indians work in torchlight, bringing in a net. It’s minutes before anyone speaks. The men explain that the salamanders are gone for ten years, wiped out when the government introduced carp. The fisherman’s dog whines and then argues violently with another off-screen. Deep in the hills of Michoacan, the pre-dawn darkness has an otherworldly bewitchment, which the directors harness.
“…fresh tales of the environment…”
The primarily Mexican setting is a real gift. The old, rural, crumbling architecture, laced with antennae and cabling, reflects the provincial science fiction of George Lucas and Ridley Scott. The subtitles are even in Star Wars yellow. While I am not entirely sure what the thread is of A Common Sequence, it doesn’t matter so much as it is all so perfectly experiential. The filmmakers are telling fresh tales of the environment, producing a strange and marvelous keyhole Koyaanisqatsi.
Gibisser and Clarke’s approach to filmmaking is stellar. They showcase people and processes that betray how deeply we have penetrated into our troubled dreams of the future. The rare treat that is A Common Sequence is at the cutting edge of contemporary documentaries.
A Common Sequence screened at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival.
"…reflects the provincial science fiction of George Lucas and Ridley Scott."
