Director: Wouter Hisschemöller
Running time: 10mins
Experimental film at its best is a kind of visual satire. It takes aspects of ‘movie-magic’ we take for granted in mainstream cinema, and rather than rushing us on to avoid picking apart the seams, forces us to dwell on the details. Films like Napoli – Amsterdam expose the trickery of filmmaking, laying it bare, and prompting us to think about the curated version of ‘reality’ we experience – and, for better or worse, what our role is in creating that.
In digital reconstructions of the titular cities, director Wouter Hisschemöller constructs and deconstructs two illustratively false scenarios – in a way I found strangely breath-taking. None of the imagery is what you could call photorealistic. In fact, the sub-Mii avatars Hisschemöller deploys here seem almost pointedly fake – jagged, low-resolution placeholders simply there to give the eyes of an undefined audience an idea where a human form should be.
But almost as soon as the first blocky car – and its angular passengers – wobble onto the screen, something amazing happens. As they trundle past a video backdrop also recorded by Hisschemöller, our imaginations have shifted into autopilot, and quietly suspended our disbelieve. This collection of colourful polygons is a car shifting down an endless highway in coastal Campania, and inside it there are not a group of strange, lumpy effigies approximating people – they are people.
The illusion shatters when Hisschemöller shifts the perspective of his digital lens. The second the car and its highway lose their basic alignment with the real-world images passing by, they convert back to being rough and ready blocks. Suddenly, the composite images are separate screens, hovering in a blue void, disparate parts of a lost whole – and we are left to wonder what the hell we were looking at in the first place; and wonder at the power of our imaginations, without which this would never have meant anything in the first place.
There are two ways to view this. The most obvious one is horror: “Look how our minds are so easily manipulated, that we can be tricked into even entertaining this kind of imagery as being grounded in any form of reality. This suspension of disbelief could be extraordinarily dangerous.”
Less obvious, but I think just as valid, is seeing this as something essential to the human experience. Without the ability to knit pieces of information together into a singular, new scenario, without being able to look past what we already know to imagine what might be, there would have been no prospect of improving our lives as a species to this point – or beyond. The use of narrative construction as a means of communication is a symptom of that remarkable cognitive flexibility – and it is why so many of our stories come with important information in them, ready to be unpacked.
So, when things come apart in Napoli – Amsterdam, for a moment, in amidst the juddering, fracturing images, it feels like you catch a glimpse of yourself at the heart of it all. You realise your imagination is the core engine needed to make any film (however competently made) work – but also that same function is key to understanding, coping with and changing the world around you. Supplying that moment, by playing with and deconstructing how films build meaning, is movie magic of a very different kind.
There are, of course, many of the experimental excesses on display in this film, which will make it difficult for a general audience to stick with. Napoli – Amsterdam is 10 minutes long, and could afford to shave that run-time in half; especially when you realise that both scenarios are on an identical loop that plays out several times before we move on. This might work well in an exhibition space, where audience members will come and go while the films are already screening – but in a cinema, where viewers will be captive for the whole period, that is hellish.
The first time we repeat the cycle of people milling about in Amsterdam’s Muntplein zebra crossing, it is hard to watch, the second, excruciating. The endless honking and clicking of the discordant soundtrack (sometimes sounding like it has been funnelled through a plastic drainpipe) for this sequence doesn’t do it any favours either. But even if you wouldn’t want to revisit Napoli – Amsterdam on that basis, I’d still say it’s well worth sitting through at least once, as a wonderful, deconstructed piece of food for thought.
One final thing which Napoli – Amsterdam should prove beyond all doubt, is that photorealism is by no means a pre-requisite for building a world audiences are willing to engage with. While Disney and co continue to pump out ‘realistic’ remakes of their catalogue of classic animations – complete with the grotesque grey film that I’m assured you only get with the absolute finest CGI – it is worth reminding the world that there is space for animation, for storytelling, which takes a more imaginative approach.