36 by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit

1: 36 by young director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit consists of 36 single static shots corresponding to the roll of films in the analogue still camera of the filmmaker.

2: Before each shot the number of the scene appears on the screen and one sentence confusing, enriching or commenting the shot.

3: Sometimes a sentence refers to a scene to come or one of the previous scenes.

4: The story is about a location scout who loses all her photos taken of one singly year she saved on a hard disc.

5: One of them showed her together with an art director she liked very much.

6: It is a highly poetical love-story set in a digital age where memories are saved on hard discs and are threaten to disappear in the very moment you capture them.

7: Its formalistic consistency feels like a liberating prison as the director denies plot information by having it happen off-screen and delivers a deeply personal point-of-view on the world.

8: At the same time a tacky score gives a strange feeling of being happy after visiting your love and going down in an elevator where lounge music plays.

9: Thamrongrattanarit finds an astonishing and unique voice talking about a digital generation and maybe makes one of the first films portraying that generation in a silent way.

10: He forces you to look at the world instead of just consuming it, just like when the art director tells the location scout that she should watch the beautiful bird in the sky with her eyes before taking a photo.

11: It is like going to Marienbad once again and bringing your camera, but when you want to show someone that you have been there everything will be erased.

12: Silence.

13: This review is written by Patrick Holzapfel and the credits appear in the middle of the film.

14: Still silence.

15: Every shot is like an erased photography that slowly begins to move.

16: Form and content kiss each other until blackness overshadows their emotions.

17: Its formalistic consistency feels a little bit overcooked, never leaving freedom to characters or 

story but rather giving all the power to a concept.

18: Bertolt Brecht would have loved it except for the last shot where suddenly feelings and sadness take control.

19: But those feelings do not come out of nothing, they are the result of melancholy that transport as well in digital images as in analogue images.

20: Digitalism could serve as a metaphor for the lack of feeling in real live, the disability to really touch things just like when the view on characters is blocked or filmed through a frame.

21: Playful,

22: but dedicated to reality “36” shows extracts of daily life, with small-talk and small observations.

23: You might find yourself drifting away because the film makes you forget about time just like a regular visit on facebook.

24: Its formalistic consistency is heavily inspiring, showing a direction where movies might head in the future.

25: Even the locations reflect the topic of past and present like an old ruin of a former motel where one can still find condoms on the floor.

26: Thamrongrattanarit even heads back to places the movie has been before showing small changes like the lack of one requisite changing everything about the place.

27: Therefore it is also a film about absence.

28: A few shots of people sitting in front of computers give the uncanny feeling of a mirror for the audience.

29: Do not move, you are a movie!

30: In a kind of meta-twist the lost pictures resemble the film itself.

31: Due to that a strange quest for “36” lies deep in the heart of “36”.

32: It is as if the film is afraid of being deleted after it has been finished.

33: A dystopian, romantic reality of film emerges out of the shots that sometimes appear to be stills.

34: Its formalistic consistency is more than just formalisms as it depicts the reality of a world bombed with digital images where it becomes increasingly hard to differ between beautiful and ugly, important and banal, memory and image.

35: I am afraid that I have forgotten something.

36: Don’t delete my review, please.