Walden

Walden comprises thirteen 360° pan shots of similar duration, ranging from seven to ten minutes. Each one sweeps across the landscape from left to right; their absolutely identical rhythm means they have been cut together in the same slow, peaceful movement that lasts one hour and forty-five minutes. Although not without a hypnotic character, the automated and uniform camera movements – which place Walden alongside other structural gestures akin to those of Michael Snow in La Région centrale (1971) or of Walter de Maria in Hardcore (1969) – hang on an extraordinarily precise mechanism: while leaving the spectator all the time and freedom to explore the signs and recesses of the image, these movements also have a choreographic quality, heightened by an elaborate sound editing, with journeys that enter its field and underline unexpected incursions as much as the movements that these are meant to accompany: the movements of a truck slowing down at the entrance of a motorway service area, of a massive cargo ship exiting a European port or a pirogue in the canals of an Amazon mangrove swamp. For this is indeed a narrative film, a Western story whose direction of reading it adopts. Just imagine, to justify a journey from an Austrian forest to a Brazilian jungle, the most aberrant reason of all is: importing timber – and this will give you an idea of the humour and eloquence that run through Daniel Zimmerman’s film.

Antoine Thirion