Mare's Tail (1969)

• 79%
• 1969
• David Larcher

It begins with a meditative, vibrating drone in the dark auditorium and ends with a word scratched onto the film strip: REFLECT - an invitation to viewers to think about what they have seen, but also the description of one of the many techniques used by David Larcher in his two-and-a-half-hour experimental film epic. Such dual and multiple meanings are a recurring motif in the film, as is the desire to decipher the foundational structures of cinematic perception. There is a fascination for the psychedelic expansion of consciousness and for the complex web of relationships between experience and memory - the film can be read as both a hippie-esque, elliptical diary film as well as an encyclopaedia of experimental image systems. "Mare's tail" is the term used in England for elongated, fraying clouds resembling a horse's tail that herald a coming rain. And just as one must learn to first see this symbol and then interpret it, David Larcher teaches us cinematic seeing in a kind of creation story of visual representation, which is at the same time a section of the director's own history, bathed in the period colours of late 1960s.