MIRRORS OF THE PLANET
(PLANETENS SPELJE)
dir. Jytte Rex, 1992
75 min. Denmark.
In Danish with English subtitles.

Described by the filmmaker as “an endless phantasy about birth, time, language, love, nature, death”, MIRRORS OF THE PLANET is a probing battery of philosophical inquiries, with black holes and rock formations re-etched in the idiom of a dissolving (or not?) relationship between astronomer Adam Morgenstern (Ole Lemmeke) and his unnamed colleague (Cher Guetze). There is no scientific certainty to Morgenstern’s work; the infinite cosmos become mere projections of his individual fears and refracted half-memories. Aside from a bone-deep romantic earnestness, what makes MIRRORS OF THE PLANET one of a kind is Rex’s collaboration with cinematographer Manuel Sellner, writing a slow-morphing spectrum of spectacular locations and Borgesian fata morganas in long, mesmerizing Steadicam takes. Words don’t just fail MIRRORS OF THE PLANET; the movie renders them useless.

screening with

THE MEMORIOUS
(DEN ERINDRENDE)
dir. Jytte Rex, 1985
39 min. Denmark.
In Danish with English subtitles.

A Mayan sorcerer, imprisoned and tortured, seeks to harness the power of a jaguar to escape his fate, while a recently paralyzed boy discovers he possesses the uncanny ability to remember everything and anything. Drawing from two stories by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1942’s Funes the Memorious and 1949’s The Writing of the God), Rex entwines both narratives into a poetic meditation on memory and the human longing to transcend suffering.