Critics reviews

A constant riotous whirlwind of eye candy.

With both [The Grand Bizarre and ★] utilizing structuralist techniques and owing their form to the history of special effects and animation, their manner of highlighting the dynamic range of patterns found on each frame of a film constitutes a cinematic experience that causes the screen to feel more like a fabric adorned in patterns (to borrow the sentiment from Giuliana Bruno).

A scintillating chromatic flurry of discourse, kept up at a glittering, flittering pace for an effervescent hour.

Mack’s feature debut is a dazzling, bountiful spree. Yards beyond what she has done before, the colorful fabrics and textiles of her shorter works are here inventively superimposed on an array of domestic and public settings to uncanny effect—as if the world itself has undergone refurbishing.

Watching a 16mm print with a crowd was, as always, a treat, because Mack's sense of timing is so spot-on that her edits make audiences laugh in the same place, responding to wrongfooting rhythms or exhilaration at the sheer speed rather than any gag per se.

Driven by a homemade soundtrack that locates a heretofore unrealized intersection between hip-hop, chiptune, and synth-pop, The Grand Bizarre tackles lofty themes at an intimate scale, imbuing familiar forms with a subtle but incisive sociopolitical force.

Mack’s film is whimsical, features some sick beats (including a riff on the Skype theme), and is so personal that it ends with the artist’s own sneeze. But the fact that it may be the most purely pleasurable film of the year shouldn’t prevent us from appreciating its exigency.

All is collective, and it’s a credit to Mack’s accomplishment that the viewing experience that The Grand Bizarre offers is dynamic enough to contain and present a critique of these processes even while it encourages us to tap our feet along to its rhythms, synched up to operations and tasks that are so labour-intensive that they become compulsive and then addictive.

Comprising tens of thousands of individually shot frames filmed in a dozen countries, Mack’s film extends some of her recent shorts—animations of vibrant geometric textiles, busted electronics, and marbled endpaper—into a dizzyingly abstract, fiercely analog worldwide symphony of ragged geometrics.

Mack is playfully butting up against the boundaries of her own cinema; the movie is constantly re-inventing the rules for how you should perceive it, for how you might adjust to its utterly unique rhythms. It’s Jodie Mack’s everything movie.

As much a musical as Dusty Stacks, whose soundtrack was a remake Dark Side of the Moon, The Grand Bizarre moves things along and separates its sections with Mack’s bespoke compositions—at once infectious and slightly parodic—that riff off of contemporary pop beat-making and give the film an infectious enthusiasm.