"Wildly innovative." "An explosive roller coaster ride." "Tour de force!"
|
"Montage is considered by many to be the form most characteristic and most revealing of the contemporary zeitgeist, retelling and actually reinventing the ways in which we construct identity both as individuals and as societies. It's hard to watch any of Kasumi's filmic constructions without feeling the truth of that statement. Douglas Max Utter
|
|
“There is no lexicon from which to describe Shockwaves. It is an associative drug and a method to self-study visual understanding. Where films express what words cannot, Shockwaves expresses what film until now has not been able to. It is a new visual language that goes beyond images, entering intravenously into our visceral understanding...The liquid blood of cinema"
Laura Casselman, writer and critic "The cognitive equivalent of a sonic boom." a viewer "A compelling experience." Ronny Carlsson, FilmBizarro, Underground and Independent Film “Visceral and emotional...as sinister as film noir but with a greater intensity. The film is plainly a labor of love, artistry, and breathtaking intellectual range.” Louis Giannetti, author of, among other books, Understanding Movies, Godard and Others: Essays on Film Form, and Masters of the American Cinema "The experience of seeing the film leaves one stunned by Kasumi's skill as an artist in a style too new for one to expect such artistry." Peter Friedman, author of 'Ruling Imagination: Law, Art & Creativity' "'Madding, brilliant. grotesque, beautiful and transcendent. The ‘le Sacre du Printemps' of our age. Bravo!” Christopher Yewell, circuit-bending artist and technologist “A visually dazzling work.” Mark McElhatten, curator of the New York Film Festival's Views from the Avante-Garde “A masterpiece!” Thomas Maos, musician “In an era of cookie-cutter, formulaic, by-the-book films, Shockwaves is truly a revolutionary work, and its creator can only be described as a genius. Kasumi has taken film to its next level, and the intense psychic and emotional journey she creates is astounding. There has never been a film like this.” Keith Fitch, composer “Fabulous! Absolutely fabulous! Tour de force!” Bruce Checefsky, filmmaker and gallerist “Shockwaves was brilliant…was as aurally interesting and thought-provoking as it was visually.” Robert Borden "I just experienced Kasumi's amazing, mind-blowing masterpiece, Shockwaves. To say that I 'saw' the film, does not do justice to the experience. I just witnessed something I never thought possible in the 120+ year history of cinema, I just experienced something utterly unique." Ross Lesko, gallerist “Shockwaves is a tsunami of audio and visual beauty overcoming the senses with the guts of life. Painful honesty peppered with punchy humor - an emotional immersive experience drowning in the collective subconscious and satisfying the soul." JJ Russ, painter |
"Shockwaves is a powerfully articulated piece that breaks all boundaries in media art.”
Greg Clayman, General Manager, Audience Networks, Vimeo "There is no standard by which to judge, no language to compare, nothing but what is in front of me. The purest act of expression that I have seen in a long time." Fredric Golding, Oscar nominated director “A metaphorical, zeitgeist story” Geoff Gilmore, director of Tribeca Film Festival and former director of Sundance Film Festival I watched this movie two weeks ago and I was surprised how it came back right into my dreams last night, expanding my access to my inner world...seeing this movie is intense, it will not be the casual popcorn movie night. It tires your mind and moves up the energy waves from deep within. Potential for a whole new realm of sensations and emotions. Andreea Voroneabu, Bucharest, Romania “Le film noir brillamment revisité ... une merveille…” Roland Quelven “Visceral, powerful, relentless…masterful. This film cannot be ignored. Undeniably powerful work from one of the most original and important artists working today.” Steven Mark Kohn, composer and librettist “Like the hypnosis violent shock therapy scene from Clockwork Orange, but feature length” a viewer “An explosive roller coaster ride. One cannot simply walk away from Shockwaves.” Dagen Shellenberger, art student “Shockwaves opens up something big and deep - it drills into the collective unconscious of the Western world.” Jordan Davis, musician “Angry, upset and amazed all at the same time. This is how the audience of the first performance of The Rite of Spring must have felt.” Christine McBurney, writer, actress and director “Shockwaves will stand as a pivotal point in our ascending march into the liberation of the human being and spirit. Bravo!!!” Bette Huston, writer and philosopher “What is revealed? The past, embodied in film as cultural memory, is amalgamated with the present, infects it, coins it, tells and retells is, like the haunting voice in Kasumi’s film repeating over and over: “This is your life!” and, more specifically, “This is your life in America!” Cornelia and Holger Lund, gallerists, new media theorists and critics "Kasumi’s cinematic approach invites the viewer to follow her principles as she guides you through the choices that flicker and pull your imagination along for a ride. It’s a great film to see!" Georgio Sabino III |
“Here we see for the first time a film which doesn’t simply allude fleetingly to the complex interrelations of time and place, thoughts and images that are inherent in any story about human beings, but rather places them right at the center of the experience. Where there are some precedents in earlier practices, Shockwaves is to earlier montage technique what modern CGI is to the Zoetrope.
Shockwaves' unprecedented richness in visual and aural associations creates a new kind of language for film; an analogue not just of our narrow‐focused, narrative seeking consciousness, but also of the vast cloud of memories, thoughts, and feelings that follow along with us every moment of our lives.
An utterly remarkable achievement that deserves to be seen by anyone who loves film, and to be studied by artists of all mediums, not just for its amazing technical accomplishment, but also for its deep and lasting emotional impact as a story of liberation and survival.
This is a truly remarkable and revolutionary film.”
Greg D’Alessio, composer and musician
“Shockwaves is a film like no other. Kasumi has created a genuinely new and original cinematic language that depicts the dissociative and improvisational nature of the internal monolog of our minds. The film thus evokes the powerful and unsettling experience of epiphany-like memories with its borderless flow of nostalgia and alienation and the powerfully articulated themes of identity, exile, abandonment, homecoming, disguise and temptation.
The originality of Shockwaves is also very much of this historical moment—one in which the very concept of originality is questioned and mashups and collage are at the forefront of artistic and literary thinking. Watching Shockwaves, with its cascading system of allusions and concentric circularity that replaces linear narrative development, requires close attention moment to moment, shot by shot.
But beyond the pyrotechnics of Kasumi’s editing, Shockwaves is to be understood like a piece of fine art – disassembled and reassembled in the mind of the viewer, analyzed and interpreted by students and scholars for years to come. “
Grafton Nunes, producer of “The Loveless” (directed by Kathryn Bigelow), president and CEO, Cleveland Institute of Art
"Kasumi tells a compelling story through a completely original art form that defies and enriches the craft of filmmaking itself. Discovered within this form of creative artistry, we find artistic weaving together of conscious and unconscious, reality and fantasy, childhood and adulthood, as an ever-changing intertwining network that defines us as feeling, thinking, acting beings. Shockwaves presents this network in symbolism of imagery and sound to unfold the tragedy of human actions, spurred by unconscious pain, that leads the characters into downfall. The film leads viewers into the darkest recesses of troubled unconscious minds with repeating, flashing rhythms of uncomfortable memories and experiences inducing in the viewer an empathic window into the repetition compulsion of neurotic process. In addition, the multi-level messages, from social satire to psychological layers, evokes a hidden thread, a call to action in the viewer, our own rebellion, to challenge the inner voices and rise above our deepest pain. We experience the recurring message: “Never forget the horror; there is no hope,” and we feel moved in reaction to cry out, 'I can move forward; there always is a better way!' By unfolding the tragic path of this doomed couple whose disturbance so relentlessly leads them to the greatest of all human evils--murder, we must come away with a renewed motivation to face our fears, outgrow our past traumas, and create a better future."
Annellen M. Simpkins, PhD & C. Alexander Simpkins, PhD, psychologists and authors
As Shockwaves begins we’re traveling underground in a dimly lit tunnel; curving tracks flash on the dark roadbed ahead. It’s a familiarly uncanny trope – for millennia human beings in search of self-knowledge have visited the symbolic core of existence via the windings of mysterious passages, twisting caverns that match up somehow with the pathways of the brain. The hallucinogenic fumes of Mediterranean volcanos, the flickering painted herds of Lascaux and Chauvet, the spiraling designs of Neolithic rock carvings, all lead down into the earth, away from daily life and day-lit understanding. But nothing can sweep the mind along the way that film does, with sound and the illusion of motion, as if by torchlight into the abysses of time. Throughout its 82 minute length Shockwaves uses such primordial promptings and rhythms to underscore Kasumi’s entirely contemporary yet timeless narrative, reaching back into the unconscious toward the wellsprings of consciousness.
The film cuts to a shot of a woman opening a box, followed by a man leafing through a bible-like tome. We hear in a voice-over: “This is your life in hell…” and soon we begin to glimpse the pain and sheer complexity of what that means, as Kasumi uses more than 25,000 film segments, many only a fraction of a second long, to tell a tragic story of domestic violence, sex, miscarriage, and murder. This tale of a man and a woman, of love and abuse and a lost child, seems somehow sculpted, brought into the third dimension both by the capabilities of digital technology and Kasumi’s painterly awareness of movement and texture. At the same time the film presents an account of what could be called behavioral recursion, outlining the way that repeating patterns of interpersonal violence twist and derail both individual lives and the fate of nations. Human history is a mosaic of such emotional templates, a matrix woven from love and hate, and Shockwaves takes both a long and short view of these eternal dilemmas as it winds through the foreshortened time of the past half-century.
The technique of montage, of juxtaposing images to produce associative, emotional depth or to alter the structure of narrative time, is at the heart of cinematic art. But as writers like Faulkner and Joyce explored the ramifications of the way humans experience and understand their bodies and cultures, Kasumi invents her own new type of narrative density, attempting a work that “streams” conscious and unconscious content together, somewhat in the manner of classic modernist authors. One difference between Faulkner and Kasumi is a difference in the speed, and also in the order of magnitude of response, that images can produce in the human brain compared to the written or spoken word. In her hands montage combined with sound and rhythmic organization seems to cross a sort of blood-brain barrier of cognitive response, generating a powerful narrative “rush.” It’s a story-telling method that exceeds the slower fix of mere language. It makes use of the strange, fast/slow perceptual wounding that non-moving pictures can generate, when they mix imagery into congealed layers of time and touch.
But while much of this could be said about earlier pioneers of the medium like Eisenstein or Cornell, or contemporaries such as Marclay, Kasumi hitches that phenomenon to her own highly original star, suggesting parameters for a psychological perspective that amounts to something like a new dimension. Her invention is essentially a meta-montage, using our civilization’s image-soaked, cinema-saturated version of life as the starting point for a work which is, finally, a tapestry of public dreams – dreams that are indistinguishable from private agonies. In Shockwaves public and private realities are intertwined in a paranoid dance. Kasumi’s visual sentences propose an ever more complex, shifting grammar of effects, available for immediate emotional impact. They take some getting used to, yet from the first minutes of Shockwaves and earlier films like BREAKDOWN (which premiered at Carnegie in 2009), the sensuously inflected psychological innovations of her obsessive visions marks them as revolutionary.
Douglas Max Utter, American painter and critic
Shockwaves' unprecedented richness in visual and aural associations creates a new kind of language for film; an analogue not just of our narrow‐focused, narrative seeking consciousness, but also of the vast cloud of memories, thoughts, and feelings that follow along with us every moment of our lives.
An utterly remarkable achievement that deserves to be seen by anyone who loves film, and to be studied by artists of all mediums, not just for its amazing technical accomplishment, but also for its deep and lasting emotional impact as a story of liberation and survival.
This is a truly remarkable and revolutionary film.”
Greg D’Alessio, composer and musician
“Shockwaves is a film like no other. Kasumi has created a genuinely new and original cinematic language that depicts the dissociative and improvisational nature of the internal monolog of our minds. The film thus evokes the powerful and unsettling experience of epiphany-like memories with its borderless flow of nostalgia and alienation and the powerfully articulated themes of identity, exile, abandonment, homecoming, disguise and temptation.
The originality of Shockwaves is also very much of this historical moment—one in which the very concept of originality is questioned and mashups and collage are at the forefront of artistic and literary thinking. Watching Shockwaves, with its cascading system of allusions and concentric circularity that replaces linear narrative development, requires close attention moment to moment, shot by shot.
But beyond the pyrotechnics of Kasumi’s editing, Shockwaves is to be understood like a piece of fine art – disassembled and reassembled in the mind of the viewer, analyzed and interpreted by students and scholars for years to come. “
Grafton Nunes, producer of “The Loveless” (directed by Kathryn Bigelow), president and CEO, Cleveland Institute of Art
"Kasumi tells a compelling story through a completely original art form that defies and enriches the craft of filmmaking itself. Discovered within this form of creative artistry, we find artistic weaving together of conscious and unconscious, reality and fantasy, childhood and adulthood, as an ever-changing intertwining network that defines us as feeling, thinking, acting beings. Shockwaves presents this network in symbolism of imagery and sound to unfold the tragedy of human actions, spurred by unconscious pain, that leads the characters into downfall. The film leads viewers into the darkest recesses of troubled unconscious minds with repeating, flashing rhythms of uncomfortable memories and experiences inducing in the viewer an empathic window into the repetition compulsion of neurotic process. In addition, the multi-level messages, from social satire to psychological layers, evokes a hidden thread, a call to action in the viewer, our own rebellion, to challenge the inner voices and rise above our deepest pain. We experience the recurring message: “Never forget the horror; there is no hope,” and we feel moved in reaction to cry out, 'I can move forward; there always is a better way!' By unfolding the tragic path of this doomed couple whose disturbance so relentlessly leads them to the greatest of all human evils--murder, we must come away with a renewed motivation to face our fears, outgrow our past traumas, and create a better future."
Annellen M. Simpkins, PhD & C. Alexander Simpkins, PhD, psychologists and authors
As Shockwaves begins we’re traveling underground in a dimly lit tunnel; curving tracks flash on the dark roadbed ahead. It’s a familiarly uncanny trope – for millennia human beings in search of self-knowledge have visited the symbolic core of existence via the windings of mysterious passages, twisting caverns that match up somehow with the pathways of the brain. The hallucinogenic fumes of Mediterranean volcanos, the flickering painted herds of Lascaux and Chauvet, the spiraling designs of Neolithic rock carvings, all lead down into the earth, away from daily life and day-lit understanding. But nothing can sweep the mind along the way that film does, with sound and the illusion of motion, as if by torchlight into the abysses of time. Throughout its 82 minute length Shockwaves uses such primordial promptings and rhythms to underscore Kasumi’s entirely contemporary yet timeless narrative, reaching back into the unconscious toward the wellsprings of consciousness.
The film cuts to a shot of a woman opening a box, followed by a man leafing through a bible-like tome. We hear in a voice-over: “This is your life in hell…” and soon we begin to glimpse the pain and sheer complexity of what that means, as Kasumi uses more than 25,000 film segments, many only a fraction of a second long, to tell a tragic story of domestic violence, sex, miscarriage, and murder. This tale of a man and a woman, of love and abuse and a lost child, seems somehow sculpted, brought into the third dimension both by the capabilities of digital technology and Kasumi’s painterly awareness of movement and texture. At the same time the film presents an account of what could be called behavioral recursion, outlining the way that repeating patterns of interpersonal violence twist and derail both individual lives and the fate of nations. Human history is a mosaic of such emotional templates, a matrix woven from love and hate, and Shockwaves takes both a long and short view of these eternal dilemmas as it winds through the foreshortened time of the past half-century.
The technique of montage, of juxtaposing images to produce associative, emotional depth or to alter the structure of narrative time, is at the heart of cinematic art. But as writers like Faulkner and Joyce explored the ramifications of the way humans experience and understand their bodies and cultures, Kasumi invents her own new type of narrative density, attempting a work that “streams” conscious and unconscious content together, somewhat in the manner of classic modernist authors. One difference between Faulkner and Kasumi is a difference in the speed, and also in the order of magnitude of response, that images can produce in the human brain compared to the written or spoken word. In her hands montage combined with sound and rhythmic organization seems to cross a sort of blood-brain barrier of cognitive response, generating a powerful narrative “rush.” It’s a story-telling method that exceeds the slower fix of mere language. It makes use of the strange, fast/slow perceptual wounding that non-moving pictures can generate, when they mix imagery into congealed layers of time and touch.
But while much of this could be said about earlier pioneers of the medium like Eisenstein or Cornell, or contemporaries such as Marclay, Kasumi hitches that phenomenon to her own highly original star, suggesting parameters for a psychological perspective that amounts to something like a new dimension. Her invention is essentially a meta-montage, using our civilization’s image-soaked, cinema-saturated version of life as the starting point for a work which is, finally, a tapestry of public dreams – dreams that are indistinguishable from private agonies. In Shockwaves public and private realities are intertwined in a paranoid dance. Kasumi’s visual sentences propose an ever more complex, shifting grammar of effects, available for immediate emotional impact. They take some getting used to, yet from the first minutes of Shockwaves and earlier films like BREAKDOWN (which premiered at Carnegie in 2009), the sensuously inflected psychological innovations of her obsessive visions marks them as revolutionary.
Douglas Max Utter, American painter and critic
