InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 10

FILM REVIEWS
vernacular of late capitalism. Using both the internalized
language of corporate publicity and the hoarder’s logic of
consumerist agglomeration, Cwynar’s images treat colour and
texture as though the muted, manicured gestures of graphic
design suddenly exceeded themselves…” Elsewhere, Phil Coldiron
describes Cwynar's work as a “pile up of words, thick and
consistent.”
To wit, Glass Life begins with Cooper’s voiceover accompanying
footage of a protest: “In the glass life, everything can be used. It
is all material — we are smooth as glass, frictionless, porous,
sourceless.” “The sky is falling, Apple stock is rising.” Less than a
minute into the film and the soundtrack and images have already
conspired at head-spinning speed to unmoor the viewer, allowing
only snippets of legible information to emerge. “Will I be nostalgic
for this time?” they ask. A repeating beat keeps time in a kind of
rhythmic monotone, while a 3D model of a swimming woman
bobs and weaves between the foreground and background
images. Cut-outs of naked women are juxtaposed with images of
Marilyn Monroe, followed by glamor shots of Kim Kardashian.
Fingers scroll through a smart phone screen at impossible
speeds, the digital animation standing in stark contrast to the
magazine pages and 16mm film images. Different textures jockey
for attention. “How do you know what size you are in the glass
life?” Cooper asks. Optical zooms enlarge images
into pixels, mixed with old CRT TV news footage. “Fascism
promises you a part in something bigger than yourself, too,” we
hear. “The voice is what’s left when signifying is done,” he says,
while an adorable pig bitmoji dances across the screen.
Glass Life is ultimately more expansive, more complex than
Cwynar’s previous films (fittingly, as it is, in part, a compendium
of those works). It’s fully in keeping with her established
aesthetic concerns — kitsch, ephemera, items lost to history, the
process of creation — while representing a marked increase in
ambition and technical achievement. There’s enough visual and
aural stimulus here to suggest that one could never exhaust or
“master” the film, and that overabundance is certainly part of the
point, a bombardment that suggests the entirety of the 21st
century crashing down on the viewer all at once. But there is
profound beauty here, not just despair. The act of creation
reaffirms our humanity in the face of digital obliteration. Glass
Life ends with a clear blue sky, the horizon line cutting through
the frame in a simple, balanced composition. We get our bearings
back just in time. The noise has reverted back to a kind of
equilibrium. Maybe that’s the best any of us can hope for. —
DANIEL GORMAN
DIRECTOR: Sara Cwynar; CAST: —; DISTRIBUTOR: Mubi;
RELEASE DATE: March 3; RUNTIME: 19 min.
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