Witness
Witnesses to terrible accidents will sometimes describe seeing them in “slow motion”. Viewers of Bas Jan Ader’s 24-second 16mm film actually do. Present, too, is the same sense of dawning horror, as we see the artist on a chair straddling the roof of a suburban home, then falling off it.
Chasm
Ader’s work rebuffed the idea that art was there to communicate. Here we see Ader’s fall represented on film, yet we can never understand how it actually felt.
Melancholy
Ader knew he was entering the slapstick world of Keaton or Chaplin here; like those comics, the abiding feeling raised by his film is melancholy.
Tragedy
Shown alongside four other “falling” films, it’s hard not to view these as premonitions of Ader’s tragic death: in 1975 he disappeared while sailing across the Atlantic.
