DVD Willful Blindness

Crafted by Berlin-based photographer and filmmaker, James Higginson, "Willful Blindness" is part of the sub-culture of "art films" where there, the "consumer" does not exist and where the art audience wants change. Higginson comes out of a history of experimental art films in the tradition of Bruce Connor's "A Movie" and Andy Warhol's "Empire." A canny and aware filmmaker, James Higginson deploys his film tools with the mastery of a mature artist. The main contrivances that Higginson wields are the unparalleled ability of the camera to stare, the post filming intervention of montage—cutting and pasting—and the symbolic role of color. He also takes up one of the single most overlooked characteristics of he movies—the ellipses—or that, which is left out and not seen. Continuing to play with the semiotics of blindness and sight, Higginson investigates the most compelling aspect of the camera vision: voyeurism. The editing style, which deservedly won a prize, the cropping of fragments, the slicing into slivers of film, propels Higginson into the conceptual: he cuts the film—rapidly and repeatedly, implying and indicated terrible acts of violence. Special notice should be taken of the superb sound editing and the original score of Roland Hackl. Hackl has skillfully explored the in-between-ness of techno/music and its split personality and its greatly expanded abilities to evoke emotions within the audience and to intervene with the diegesis. In the hands of Hackl, the absence of the naturalizing effects of dialogue becomes an asset to be exploited and music re-takes its traditional original role in the film as a stand-alone experience, quick marching the viewer to the determined denouement. James Higginson takes the concept of film to its final limits—that it is not the camera that is the projector, it is us, our minds, reaching out of the depths of the repressed impulses who streams our darkest fears onto a helpless blank white screen. Powerful and moving, even frightening, Willful Blindness is an act of art.