Uninhabited Space

Dallas Texas / After The Goldrush
Klaus Wyborny, 1971

Wyborny has an astonishing capacity on display both here and his later (and slightly more developed, yet in many ways less obtuse) Birth of a Nation. I would argue that both are masterpieces of experimental cinema. What the filmmaker has done exemplifies the Joycean adage of "tell a simple story in a complex manner"--using, instead of linguistic play, an interrogation into the visual apparatus, exploiting how we passively or actively watch (and involve ourselves) in cinema, how the non-diegetic use of popular music (and the lyrics therein) can paint (or, arguably, taint) how we're reading what we see on screen... once again there's something impossible about Wyborny does here, he makes us question what we've seen, what we're seeing.

Structured here as A-B-A2-B-A (but is it? actually?) we are presented with repetitions of a scene, one fragment entitled "Dallas Texas" (shown first in color, then--at the center of the film--in black and white, then again in color), another fragment, longer, entitled "After the Goldrush" (shown in color both times it appears between the "Dallas Texas" fragment). But Wyborny does not simply repeat the fragments, as each repetition seems slightly changed, a permutation of what was seen before, a different angle? No, a different universe, parallel in narrative trajectory.

Perhaps "unknowable" is a better term than "impossible." The core narrative seems to be a love triangle, one man discovers the other and (but does this actually happen?) murders him in a fit of jealous rage. This is, perhaps, what seems to be playing out, but Wyborny's film refuses to actually coalesce on these details. Is this narrative only implied via the pop music that's peppered throughout? The gestures are almost absent, the only real exegesis of emotion comes in a rapid change of coats on a hillside and a paroxysm of collapse (from a gun? from stroke? we're refused the knowledge). Unknowable, but never less than engaging.