The Fourth Dimension

🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿

🎙️ EPISODE 480: 06.02.22 The only reason I watched this was to complete my Korine deep dive and, as such, his entry in this triad of short films anthology was the one that stood out the most. The other two are fine, pretty good even, but Harmony's 40-minute movie featuring an unhinged Val Kilmer playing himself as some small town motivational speaker is essential viewing. This was one of my absolute favorite things by him that I've seen. It's a mockery of capitalism and motivational speakers and the very idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. He's working in some hybrid style which is somewhere between the aloof and chintzy pop culture explorations in Mister Lonely and the blown out anything goes post-pop of Spring Breakers. It hit a sweet spot for me that I absolutely loved.

What “The Lotus Community Workshop” is defies explanation to some degree some let me just show you two minutes of when Val really starts to heat up…

The whole thing is on YouTube so you can indulge in the entirety of that bonkers beauty in full for free.

A longline for this work as a whole reads "Created under a “manifesto” whose directives would make Lars von Trier shudder" but I could not find that "manifesto" anywhere online, so I'm thinking that's a bit of myth-making. Each film references the idea of a "the fourth dimension" directly, however (three title drops for the price of one!), and they jive well together thematically as a triad.


The second piece, Russian filmmaker Aleksey Fedorchenko's "Chronoeye" is about a man who invents a sorta time machine but it only allows him to see back in time via short bursts of video from the POV of a singular individual. He tries to see his deceased wife on her final day on earth but he only gets the same clip from the perspective of her hands on the piano. All the while, his upstairs neighbor is making him crazy with her feet stomping as she practices dancing. It turns out being a sweet and sensitive work about loss, time and breaking free, not just from the pain of the past but the uncertainty of the future.


At first glance, the final film — "Fawns" by Polish filmmaker Jan Kwiecinski (the youngest of the three) — is the most nihilistic, but it too lands on an oddly hopeful note. The subject matter here is the most overtly tied to large-scale world issues: the pending climate disaster. And our protagonists are four young people rummaging through a deserted town which has recently and abruptly been evacuated. Their disobedience turns out to be less driven by an apathetic death drive than it is one of exasperation and fatigue; they didn't create these problems, but they know they'll be tasked with fixing them (if that's even possible). The fourth dimension as a construct or concept in art is meant to be intentionally vague. Poet Ezra Pound wrote in 1937:

The fourth; the dimension of stillness. And the power over wild beasts

And I think that's a good quote to end on, to make myself seem more fake smart. What are these characters' motivation, in all three films, other than to reach out beyond themselves and then back inside themselves, to quell some unnatural force.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 480 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 481B ⫸

---

The Fourth Dimension is a 2012 independent film composed of three segments all created by different directors. In 2013, VICE Films worked with Grolsch Films Works to produce the film, which starred Val Kilmer and Rachel Korine in Harmony Korine's segment, "The Lotus Community Workshop." It was released on April 24, 2012.