I feel I need to douse some cold water on the spent positive nitrate here...as much as I liked Bill Morrison's doc about coal mining history in England, with a fantastic score by Johan Johanson...I must say that I had to walk out on all this decay after a good 40 minutes, I just decided I didn't have to suffer more. Conveniently, experimental films don't have to make sense (here the title says it all), they eschew narratives and they expect the spectators to bring their own way to figure out what's going on. And if they can't, they can enjoy the sights and sounds. In light of the formidably mediocre and boring "The Artist" that will reap its copious share of Oscar statuettes, courtesy of its ferocious US distributor with pit-bull attack techniques, this film is just a montage of old silent footage that barely distills anything. The figure of the spool or the wheel returns often (OK, we got it), and it's one long laborious stretch of things from the past. Since both newsreels and fiction scenes are all mixed up , it becomes pointless to try to attach much importance to what the segments show. (Again, the coal mining doc by same director really told a beautiful and powerful story, with same techniques, but sans decay). Some might enjoy this trip to nostalgia, made vaguely contemporary by the decayed look of the images, it just left me cold and bored. Another reviewer suggested to try to watch the film with another music: rightly so, this score added enormously to the difficulty to enjoy this film, for me. Obviously , it seems I'm in a minority here, but I don't mind.
