Dust
Emiline Forster @ Iris Cinema
7:30pm, Sat 19 Feb 2011
There’s little more than a handful of people at the Iris for this one-off screening of Dust, once you remove director / performer Emiline Forster from the crowd; she gives a short little introduction to the film, explaining that it was a video interpretation of an existing piece of dance (which won the Best Dance award at the 2010 Melbourne Fringe, no less!).
There’s a strong opening – clad in a white cleanroom suit and full gas mask, Forster performs a piece that is reminiscent of footage of assembly-line robots; it’s a convincing and identifiable introduction to the commercial industrial message of the piece. Unfortunately, it’s followed by the biggest let-down of the film – a segment that includes fast-moving, tongue-in-cheek characterisations of bureaucrats and executives, revelling in their profits. These little skits and dances, with their distinctly amateurish presentation, really coloured my view for a large amount of the remaining film.
And that’s a shame, because the slow-yet-desperate nature of the remaining dance – lots of deliberate, anxious reaches and sweeps – is really quite lovely. Music excerpts throughout are great – a pleasing mix of industrial, light metal, and ominous ambient pieces accompany the dance segments of the film, and the sound design in general is excellent. The direction of the movie, too, is great: there’s wonderful framing of the subjects, and the constant shift of focus – whether intentional or not – creates a delicious texture to the movie, which already revels in noisy low-light compression.
It’s just that little “skit” segment that lets the whole piece down… because it stands out like a sore thumb compared to the quality of the rest of the work. But, based on the rest of the movie, Forster clearly has the eye of both a director and choreographer, as well as being a great dancer.