Director: Richard Philpott
Running time: 40mins
3rd aye is the first time we have reviewed sequential films on Indy Film Library. Conventionally, a sequel is a rehashing of the original article, dialled to 11. The same, but more. But as you should well know from i 2 aye, there is very little conventional about Richard Philpott.
Coming in about 20 minutes shorter than its predecessor, 3rd aye is a pared-back third instalment in Philpott’s semi-auto-biographical series of experimental features. While the previous film (and before that, presumably the first of the series, which I have not seen) focused on the globe-trotting escapades of Philpott – and his alter-ego Flipot – as they strove to defy the concept of individual personification, there is less of this in the third episode. Instead, the extended contact with Philpott’s case study seems to have taken a toll on the researchers at ‘Das Institut für den reinen Tor’ (the fictional Institute for the Pure Fool canonically presenting this series on Philpott) in Menschheim, Germany.
As they attempt to delve into the latest stretch of Philpott’s life, on the brink of the 21st century, the narrators (a man and a woman, voiced by a purposefully robotic text-to-speech application) are increasingly at war with themselves, and their surroundings.
The man finds his sentences eating themselves, warping and falling back in on themselves in a babbling uroboros of mispronunciations and strange rhymes. The longer he chases Philpott’s eclectic and nonsensical trail in a bid to categorise him, the less categories seem to actually mean, and the more he ends up sounding like the victim of Pontypool’s God Bug.
The woman, meanwhile, is similarly losing her grip on the structures she had put in place to tell this story. The rigid, formal devices that filmmakers put in place to try and turn the complexities of a human life into a story suddenly feel as though they are rebelling against her efforts. In one Pythonesque sequence, for example, the woman is forced to cut short her introductory paragraph, to remonstrate with an over-zealous horn player in the film’s backing track who has repeatedly interrupted her.
As the situation progresses, the talk of Philpott subsides (and his earlier pseudonym Flipot entirely vanishes) – perhaps as he always wanted. Whoever he is or isn’t, Philpott has avoided definition, and become a nobody in his own film. At the same time, his self-defence mechanism, patiently crafted over a frenetic five-decades of art, has made a thorough example of those who sought to ignore his wishes of anonymity. Like the poison of a rattlesnake who a ‘Pure Fool’ decided they were going to pick up, in spite of its deafening warnings, Philpott’s anti-personality sets to work eating away at the tissue of his pursuers, attacking their own senses of self.
The question has ceased to be ‘Who is Philpott?’It is now ‘Who is ANYBODY?’
As intriguing as this is, however, it does come with something of a trade-off, in terms of how enjoyable it is as a standalone film. If shown in conjunction with i eye aye and i 2 aye, it will work well as a chilling epilogue to the things the audience is introduced to in those parts. As I mentioned in my previous review, the alternative format the director has chose serves as a wonderful exhibition-space for his art – last time we saw things like a ‘visual organ’ “in the carcass of an evacuated television”, and a large installation, made up of old circuit boards, disassembled jigsaws and mousetraps baited with dollar-bills. But moving beyond this kind of work in the third part means there are fewer opportunities to actually enjoy the works Philpott has devoted his life to.
At the same time, this is pushed back in favour of emphasising a line of philosophical thought which slightly abandons the most interesting point raised in the film. While it is all very well that the characters of the two narrators might now be questioning what it means to be themselves, if anything at all, it feels inconsequential. Realising you exist as an entity between memory and forgetfulness – defined by things you cease to remember, and which you remember but no-longer are – might be liberating, it might be devastating; but in this third part, it just feels ambivalent.
In the second part, Philpott’s paths crossing with Marxist thinker F. A. Ridley – bringing to a head a search to rail against an economic system that sought to put him in a box for the sake of monetary gain, and suggesting there might be a way to rebel without simply lashing out at everyone. At the same time, another possible ending suggested he might adapt his ambition to go without personality to become a Buddhist. Here, though, there are no such elaborations when it comes to the possibilities that now stretch out before our narrators. Arguably, that is for them – or us – to decide. But this questioning of self is also one of the most recognisable psychological or philosophical tropes around – and without developing it further, it does leave Philpott’s latest effort feeling a little easier to define and categorise than he would probably like.
Some things have changed. The focus of the film seems to have turned in on itself – and whether that works for you very much depends on your relationship to the previous films, or experimental cinema as a whole. But in the end, for my own part, I have to reflect on what I said about Philpott’s work last time. 3rd aye remains a piece of work which sets out to confound categorisation, and attributing it any number of stars will never really succeed in letting you know what it’s actually like. I can only recommend that you see it for yourself – especially if you get the chance to view it as part of the full trilogy.