Kent Jones on Omirbaev

"Gaston Bachelard would have been excited by Omirbaev's allegiance to the grain of lived experience, his devotion to a precise accounting of the machinery of perception, his insistence on a film form that actually does achieve vertically without lapsing into strict ordinary time. [..]

Omirbaev does not appear to "arrive" at any moment with ease : each one of his films feels worked, brooded upon, every choice and move endlessly mulled over, albeit with the purpose of staying here to the instant, the sensation of being awake to the life of the world while the humdrum continuum of linear time plods on and on and on around you. Nonetheless, Bachelard could be describing almost any given film or scene by this artist of intensified quietude." [..]

"The tension between inner and outer experience, between their distance on the one hand and their intimate proximity on the other, is painfully felt throughout every Omirbaev film. He is constantly exposing the gulf between expectation and reality, the positive and negative disruption of mental scenarios by aurally experience."
excerpt from : Kent Jones, "The Art of Seeing with One's Own Eyes. Darezhan Omirbaev, a world-class cinematic poet from, that's right, Kazakhstan" (Film Comment, Vol 44, #3, May-June 2008)

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