Wasted (Naar de Klote - 1996) directed by Aryan Kaganof

(this film made 13 years ago, has not dated an iota)

Kaganof has masterfully tackled the vexing conundrum of ‘90’s drug culture with stroke after stroke of perceptive genius....superbly supported by a cast of players who never for a second falter, all bearing equal import...

“the invisible tensive straws that can save us are those of individual human integrities..in daring to steer the individual’s course only by truth, strange as the realised truth may often seem....wherever and whenever the truths are evidenced to the individual...wherever they may lead, unfamiliar as the way may be....”

thus wrote Richard Buckminster Fuller in CRITICAL PATH (1981)

...and its as if Kaganof has, using the perceptual license of film and all its associated chemisty and possibility of revelation, set out to transmute and demonstrate exactly how this statement morphs, into and from, real life...forming a potent contextual value system within our seemingly random life paths...

...the threads that bind....

...as an artist might create a daub of pure red oil paint on an otherwise multifaceted incoherent backdrop and let it sit there speaking volumes...rising to the occassion....burning into consciousnss....Kaganof illuminates the undercurrent of tetchy and/or tender personal relationships from a deceptively simple self evident view point, allowing the complexities, the intra/extrapersonal tropisms (needs, wants) to run their course in this snippet of ‘90’s slice-of-life drug culture. In so doing, Kaganof never misses a beat, a thread, a nuance. He constantly places these kaleidoscopic points of human behaviour under the microscope and extracts from them an essence, a heart...an energy, that, with uncanny precision and insight, travels both backwards and forwards in time within an instant.....

.....we get the full picture immediately...we get the real deal.

Personal interactions within the drug world are never fully explainable: they are lived, driven by an interconnective energy that has its own inherent logic...magnified by a speeded up time frame...

...each and every archetypical character that Kaganof focuses on within this subculture becomes a geodesic link, a portal - an immediate visual connection - to an invoked conceptual insight of human behaviour....

...in order to concertina the individual histories into the shortest yet clearest possible statement...

...manipulating the medium into a coherent whole...

...determining an existential experiential participation from the viewer...

....transmuting that geodesic architectural infrastructure/concept filmatically into the visual construction of a ploy (DD - Afke Reijenga - and Yoyo - Jarinda Moll sizing up and making a move on DJ Cowboy - Thom Hoffman), of a sentence, a body gesture, a sweep of the hand, the styling of a garment, dark hair geometrically styled and knotted in pouting baubles, party tickets illuminating into money, spinning vinyl multi-layered by flashing disco UV, lower-lid eye muscles contracting in forwarning of emotinal pain - yet ignored, a switch of the degree of lighting and colours from garish to drab, a clinical study of different degrees of maturity pulling apart (Jacqueline - Fem van der Elzen - and Martijn - Tygo Gernandt), a dissipated semi-erect penis, dance crowds morphing along random lines of interconnectivity, a thirst quenched like no other after sexual abandon, a pliant woman yielding within the peaks of drugged debauchery, different ambitions and drives crisscrossing on this flighty ladder of one-upmanship, the emphemeral vacuousness of fame swinging from potency to impotence in an instant, weighted directions balancing on precarious and fragile egos, inherently terminal drug addled mindsets resting on their tender laurels....

...in keeping the framework carefully hung within the tenuous fault line of the human condition...

...incidentally.....petulantly...

...the chaos within the detail, the order....

...the order within the chaos, the insanity....

...the film swings back and forth, forth and back...

...pulsating at different speeds, different levels....different dimensions...

.....the interactivity hangs in there, in-between the casual conversations, the flippant connections...the meanness of intent, the breaking of trusts.....gaining momentum.....encapsulating the deeper import.......embedded, having been injected into the undercurrent of the tensile relationship/s....simmering......upward....gathering momentum.....cause and effect.....

...and then is left to reach its own...

....moment of reckoning....

...its inherent consequence of deed....

...must prove its intrinsic value....

...a complex karmic relentless mechanism bound together cinematically from the very first frame to the very last....

....nothing less will do....

and layered into this still is:

"Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guaranteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors. Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder"

embodied most profoundly by the character of Jacqueline (Fem van der Elzen: giving a beautiful and nuanced performance and in essence thereby becoming the quintessential ‘90’s pioneer heroine) who tranforms, survives, matures, having tested her integrity to the limit....incidentally....

...and i come away with a profound feeling of an understanding (which i cannot fully explain) of why some people die, and others live....why some people must die, and others must live....

...carrying with me an elated feeling of the thrill of what it means to have.....

....integrity....