Henri Plaat, 1971
Plaat has a formal elegance--beyond mere composition, he has an eye for color that let's the screen permeate the retina so specifically... Plaat tilts his frame in a way that seems like the cinematic equivalence of the uncanny; slightly off but you can't really tell why. In terms of image-making Plaat is, here, somewhere between Wyborny and Zwartjes, but what makes Fragments... interesting is the way it inadvertently (perhaps) positions itself as a "post-ethnographic" film. For a point of reference, I think this film does something similar to Martine Rousset's Hotel Turkoman, operating within the 'otherness' of what was once called "exotica," or "orientalism," -- instead of positioning the experience of the film outside of this "estrangement," the film positions the experience inside of this "estrangment" instead of outside (this affects the gaze and how the images are delivered to us). I feel like this positioning does something remarkably different from what Russell or Rivers (or any of the more contemporary brand of "post-ethnographic films"1). Also, it is extremely important to note that the score here is phenomenal.
1 The films of this ilk are often more "lived in"--the complicity with the subject of the lens ends up removing the "aura" of mystery, and I realize that in terms of post-colonialism there's probably many many many people who would straight up call "bullshit" on this idea, but when it's an "aura" in cinema that is what appeals to you I don't think it should be so easily dismissed: this should be examined, absolutely, but mystery--or the aura of something different--does not inherently have to be delivered with any sort of hierarchical positioning that problematically places the viewer "above" (or removed from) what she is seeing.
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