Scales in the Spectrum of Space

This miniature urban symphony, commissioned by the Chicago Film Archive and set to the music of jazzman Phil Cohran, interweaves footage from thirty films that render the rhythm of this vertical metropolis and its architectural patterns. The idea of editing some seventy hours of the found footage in a chronological order is immediately ruled out; time is pulverised by space – a vertical movement that descends from the galaxy towards a plane on a ship, then down to an undersea volcano, giving the emblematic Chicago skyscrapers a cosmic dimension. It only needs a woman smelling flowers in her garden to gaze up at the sky for the movement to set off again in the opposite direction, in this purely association-based visual and sound poem reminiscent of Bruce Conner’s work. For this pop collage of the city, which updates the urban rhythm using 16mm archive footage, Fern Silva has found a polysemic title: the word “scales” evokes the film’s constant dialogue between large and small dimensions, but also musical scales and the scales that fall from one’s eyes – in front of the beauty of this flow, where the human (snatches of police violence, workers on some scaffolding) is reintegrated into a much vaster perpetual movement. (Charlotte Garson)