The geometry of reconciliation: Shane Carruth (Jeff) and Amy Seimetz (Kris) embody the infinity symbol (lemniscape), a recurring motif in this luminous transcendent holistic work of art.
After garnering critical acclaim at Sundance Film Festival, where it won a sound design award, garnering more buzz for its international premiere at the 2013 Berlinale, and raising its profile further by opening SXSW, Upstream Color begins its theatrical release in New York City on April 5.
The second feature of Shane Carruth is the ultimate auteur film of the digital age, a liberating marriage of technology, talent and vision. By transmuting his many talents -- he directed, produced, edited, shot, starred while writing both score and screenplay -- into a quest as personal as it is universal, Carruth has carved an exciting new interdisciplinary space in the mass medium of film. Audiences may be stunned, confused, mystified and intrigued by Upstream Color, but they emerge from the experience never quite the same; such is the transcendent power of a holistic art form.
Upstream Color is the most avant-garde of a hopeful new movement in American cinema focusing on the land itself -- the devastated material containing the biological memory of where things have gone terribly wrong.
Upstream Color is as startling as it is daring precisely because it goes directly to the source -- the female body.
Amy Seimetz as the gender-neutered offspring of the corporate cubicle; she undergoes a spiritual conversion after being injected with a "timeless organism."
The biggest challenge facing artists in the 21st century is providing not only imagery but coherent narratives to a conscious embodiment of the long-repressed primordial energy.
The nationwide release of Upstream Color is a miracle in that it does both. It not only provides sound and imagery, but a nonlinear/linear narrative of an erotically-charged conversion into a new archetype.
Can an on-screen exploration of equal partnership be faked? Not likely. Here the romantic thriller genre is reconfigured by the mutual search for a private space of surrender. This journey into the sacred marriage between the characters of Jeff and Kris is made transparently authentic by Carruth pairing himself with Amy Seimetz. "She really got it," Carruth told the audience after the Berlinale screening.
If the biological intervention into the female body by an ambiguously motivated male seems misogynistic, it establishes a new precedent as metaphor for what companies like Monsanto are arguably doing to nature. Such a breakthrough couldn't have happened under the academic/artist discourse of the recent past. Yet, in smashing this boundary, the counter-sexual violation behind the invasive "timeless organism" counterpart to an eternal archetype unifies physics and biology within a new integral (erotic) consciousness surrounding the female body as the ultimate battleground of patriarchal control.
Upstream Color awakens the female body out of technological domination (above Kris with headphones on a train prior to a romantic encounter with Jeff).
In a pig's eye: The film's interwoven narrative restores the ancient connection between the long-repressed feminine divine and the pig, delivered into contemporary art via Heide Hatry.
The loss and reclamation of the offspring from this "sacred marriage" takes place, crucially, by way of Henry David Thoreau's Walden; at first this literary artifact of the theosophist struggle to reconcile man and nature is integrated into the body by way of a therapeutic physical deconstruction of text into the lemniscape; and then, the disjointed text itself is reclaimed as an erotic exchange between speechless lovers separated by the contained waters of a swimming pool, reflecting a mutual space of co-existence between human and archetype. Such an archeology into the repressed origins of the birth of American literature reframes the human struggle as an inner balance between the gender polarities.
Kris (Amy Seimetz) in a half-dream, her face reflecting the ambiguity of the neither/nor space where the new archetype emerges by way of the erotic connection.
This is the miracle of Upstream Color: the transformation of the human body into a new archetype. The result is a leap into a new paradigm and the celebration of a rare event that provides hope for the blossoming of a holistic culture: the passage of the avant-garde into the American mainstream.
Only by excavating what has been lost, made visible now in the parched western land as in the spiritually starved female body of the corporate cubicle, can we take the lead of Upstream Color and move, yes upstream, into a holistic culture in which equal genders working in partnership return civilization to its ever-present origin.
All film stills are courtesy of erbp Film and used with permission of the filmmaker.
Lisa Paul Streitfeld is a philosopher and multidisciplinary critic based in Berlin.