The deconstruction of the camera eye is pushed to the utmost in this experimental short film featuring four 'characters': the motorbike, the woman, the mountains and a series of abstract cubes.
Made one year after Combat de boxe, this film dates from its author’s experimental period. Charles Dekeukeleire is familiar with the work and theories of Epstein and Delluc as well as with the research into form, rhythm and movement conducted by plastic artists such as Man Ray, Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp. He is also involved with the constructivist group and journal 7 arts, made up of architects, painters, musicians and poets. He immediately voices his support for the principles of ‘cinéma pur’, rejecting the literary in favour of the poetic and shunning narrative for an emotion drawn from the unique play of cinematic language.
An introductory title informs the spectator that the film will be composed of four series of images, “the motorbike, the woman, the mountain and abstract blocks”, elements which serve as the starting point for Dekeukeleire to construct his film according to very precise parameters. The rhythm is given by a mathematical fragmentation of the film’s running time, divided up into temporal segments where the four repertories of images succeed each other in every possible combination with no respect for either melodic line or dramatic tension. This investigation into the positioning of shots proceeds in conjunction with a study of the scale of a fragmentation which lifts the shown object out of reality and gives it a function close to abstraction. This film counts amongst those which, resisting all emotional seduction or aesthetic fascination, have gone furthest in the demand for pure and fundamental experimentation.
“Impatience closes a period of my work. Sensing myself too separated from the public and the exhibitors in practicing abstract filmmaking, I plan, in my upcoming project, to use a scenario of a more realistic spirit, always maintaining in its story the serious plasticity and high rhythmic sense that I have sought and still seek.”
Charles Dekeukeleire
“During this same period, the Surrealists were making their films. Buñuel’s Un chien andalou, with its eye-slitting, severed hand, and dead donkeys confronted spectators directly with shocking images. Yet Impatience avoided such tactics. Rather, Dekeukeleire builds audience frustration into the film’s form and style. “Impatience” as a title suggests as much the audience’s state as the character’s. The mounting frustration of this film, and later of Histoire de détective, constitutes their aggression.”
Kristin Thompson
