Max Hattler

mong a number of sound-focused exercises in Off-Limits program, this work for me stands out as arguably the most radical and self-consistent. Departing unreservedly from early avant-garde experimentation with optical sound, Hattler (apparently, with his Hong Kong team of students and collaborators, as usual) attempts to take that from the frames’ margins to the centerpiece, as if striving to synthesize anew a sort of audio-visual universum of digital era. “Abstract motion becomes sound. What you hear is exactly what you see” – he claims. Have to take it on trust. In any case, if not exactly pleasing music to your ears, it’s arresting enough. But also is dizzyingly mesmerizing the sheer ballet of those hissing lines, their dynamic geometry– somehow rhyming with weirdish geometric poetry in action of the cityscapes in his earlier films.