DOK Leipzig Review: Prelude and Fugues - The Wood Thrush is a transcendent and abstract symphony

Leipzig, Germany is playing host to DOK Leipzig next week. It's a festival celebrating documentaries and animated films, featuring more than 200 shorts and features. Their lineup is fantastic, and full of what you might call hidden gems. When I was perusing the animated offerings, there were multiple titles I've never heard of. While other festivals default to awards season animated offerings, here's a festival that goes off the beaten path with its programming -- very cool stuff.

Which brings me to my first review of a title playing the festival: Pierre Hébert's Prelude and Fugues - The Wood Thrush. It's kind of funny for me to even attempt to review this movie, as it sort of defies description. How do you rate or review something like this, something that feels like it maybe should be playing in a museum rather than on a cinema screen? Why do I even feel that way? Why does a movie being so abstract, so "challenging," make me want to classify it outside of the mainstream definition of a movie? Cinema can be so many things. It can be this. 

Prelude and Fugues is kind of like watching an abstract animation version of a piece of music. It is, indeed, broken up into segments: a prelude and five fugues. At the beginning of each one, we're given what you might call a track list, a few phrases or words that describe the movement we're heading into. It's all very impressionistic, even primitive. The sounds and music and images feel like they're beyond language and even beyond imagery. It feels like it gets right to the base essence of what it is to have a sensory experience. Maybe this is what it feels like when a baby starts to perceive the world around it, and it all feels chaotic and noisy, impossible to understand even though it's the world that it was born into, that it will someday walk through with confidence. Maybe this is what it feels like to have a schizophrenic break. Maybe this is what it feels like to die and go to heaven.

My understanding of Hébert's process with this film is that he scratches the animation directly onto film stock. The resulting imagery is haphazard, ecstatic. Most of what we see is frenzied lines, strokes, clusters. But once in a while, vaguely human-shaped images appear. And it was so interesting to me how I would latch onto those shapes. It speaks to our desire to find ourselves, to find humanity, something to latch onto. We want to be able to narrativize everything in our lives, maybe especially the things we watch. That is, in this case, an exercise in futility, but it's also quite revealing. Every time that "character" reemerged on screen, I was like "Ah, there he is. Here I am." By the end, I felt a visceral connection to that person. My stomach actually flipped reading the imagery as a free fall (one of the last bits of text that appears is "men in free fall"). It was a bizarre experience, a transcendent one.

As much as this is a fascinating visual journey, so, too, is it an immersive aural one. Hébert crafts his film around recordings of the eponymous wood thrush and flies buzzing. These sounds recur over others, and feel like the thread pulling us through the strange imagery. There are moments that are extremely playful, including times where it feels like the flies are being splatted onto the screen. Others are more mystifying, ethereal. 

I used the word "challenging" up above, which may be a wrong way to consider this film. I think it you go into this hoping to "get" it, you may end up being frustrated, and find the film challenging. But if you decide to immerse yourself in it, let your gut lead you, let the film envelope you, it's an easy watch, I think. A lot of the film is weirdly soothing, until it's not. The final couple segments take on a spikier quality (and a more colorful one). "The archaeology of pain" is one of the descriptors for the penultimate fugue. There's much to uncover, to feel.

Sure, Prelude and Fugues may feel like something that you'd expect to find at a museum, but I really enjoyed watching it on my screen. I watched it right after ending my work day, and it felt like freeing my mind, venturing into some abstraction of nature where I could feel things without needing to necessarily examine those feelings. It's hard to describe what this movie is, what it feels like, but it's one that's worth seeking out. And it made me eager to explore more of Hébert's work (which you can check out here).

You can find ticketing information for Prelude and Fugues - The Wood Thrush at DOK Leipzig here.