The Fourth Dimension is a strange beast. Although billed as a single feature, it is in fact a succession of three short films – one American, one Russian, one Polish – all of which present their own unique take on the impact that the fourth, temporal dimension has on people’s lives. A series of quotes from Albert Einstein, Sergei Eisenstein and Doc Brown (from Back to the Future) are shown at the start of the film, giving the audience an idea of what scientists and theorists (both real and fictional) think about the dimension in question. These preconceived notions about the nature of the fourth dimension are to be challenged, however, according to the list of instructions apparently given to each film-maker involved in the project. As the graphics shown between each segment tell us, the purpose of the film is to make us think about the fourth dimension in ways we never have before.
Indie favourite Harmony Korine’s The Lotus Community Workshop opens proceedings, and deliberately blurs the line between fiction and reality by featuring Hollywood star Val Kilmer playing a (seemingly) fictional version of himself. The film follows Kilmer as he embarks on his new, post-acting career as a motivational speaker who plays messiah to groups of enraptured, desperate fans. In this segment, the fourth dimension is “heaven on earth”, a state of being which is attainable, claims the actor, with the help of the alien beings who gave him a new understanding of life. Kilmer is magnetic in the role of starry-eyed, hippy man-child, although the extent to which it is a genuine performance, and not merely Kilmer playing himself, is a mystery. The segment as a whole acts as a wryly humorous look at celebrity self-help culture, although its message about the all-important fourth dimension remains unclear.
The second short film is Alexey Fedorchenko’s Chronoeye, a very different sort of piece about a lone Russian scientist (Igor Sergeev) obsessed with building a machine which can see into the past. Driven by personal tragedy, he seeks a way to recapture lost moments, but his narrow-minded pursuit of the past at the expense of his present is mirrored by his device’s frustrating inability to gain access to the bigger picture. Here the fourth dimension is represented in a more traditional form, and Sergeev’s character repeatedly laments humanity’s inability to move as freely in time as we can in space. For all its scientific and philosophical musing, Fedorchenko’s segment is deeply touching, and, unlike its two companion pieces, has enough raw story material that it arguably should have been extended into a feature film in its own right.
The final instalment is called Fawns, and comes from Polish director Jan Kwiecinski. Four youths run amok in an abandoned country town, as a flood of apocalyptic proportions slowly bears down on them. Initially concerned only with self-gratification and hedonistic indulgence, the group eventually rediscovers their humanity when one of their number goes missing. Kwiecinski makes heavy use of symbolism here, and in this segment the fourth dimension is represented by the oncoming flood; time portrayed as a mighty deluge which bears down upon us as we pursue our little dreams. The moment of natural beauty which closes the film seems to suggest that all we can do is appreciate the good things in life while we can.
In the end, The Fourth Dimension feels a little too disjointed to stand up as a coherent film. The individual segments all make for compelling viewing, but the three directors’ interpretations of the project’s shared premise are too wildly different for any real sense of unity to emerge. That said, if having Val Kilmer’s name on the poster secures a wider audience for the work of Fedorchenko and Kwiecinski then the collaboration will have been worth the effort, and each of the three works on display here is absolutely deserving of that wider audience. So what is the fourth dimension? Something the three stories all seem to agree on is that the answer to that question is rather inconsequential. What matters is not how we understand time, but rather what we do with the small amount of it which is given to us.
Jim “Aristotle ate my brain” Taylor, geekzine correspondent, reporting from the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012
[suffusion-the-author]
[suffusion-the-author display='description']