Film Ist: A Girl And A Gun

Film Ist:  A Girl & A Gun is basically the cinema equivalent of moving in with your significant other. There’s no more pretending, and the truth about how you feel will inevitably be revealed—either you like experimental Brakhage-esque film or you don’t.

Austrian filmmaker—or rather, film-splicer—Gustav Deutsch pieced together a ton of footage, mostly from the early 20th Century, and paints a picture, which, at its heart, is primarily concerned with fucking and dying.  The film combines shots of nature, war, nudists, and sex, with a soundtrack of droning, delayed guitars and odd shrieks.

In two or three instances in the film, Deutsch allows the original audio of the footage to bleed through, which is a bit disarming. After so many muted characters, you kind of forget that people are capable of speech, so hearing them actually say something catches you off guard.

The film is presented in four episodic sections, and clocks in at a little more than an hour and a half. For a film that is so layered with symbols and sonic stimuli, it drags on a bit too long. Audience members need time to take it in—to analyze, and digest. And this film doesn’t really allow you to do so. 

Although Deutsch’s collage of sights and sounds is, at times, breathtaking—the last episode is practically inspirational with its juxtaposition of cannons firing, explosions in the distance, and an extreme close up of a penis penetrating a vagina (seriously)—the barrage of thematic, metaphoric, and inexplicable images overwhelm. In the end, the film separates the poseurs from the geeks. If you can sit through it, you’ve earned your avante-garde merit badge. 

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