THE WAY OF THE WEED
Peter Missotten - An-Marie Lambrechts - Anne Quirynen 1997 | film | 90 min. on vimeo
With: Thomas McManus, Tamas Moritz, Regina Van Berkel, Antony Rizzi, Ana Catalina Roman, Demond Hart, Jone San Martin, Jacopo Godani
And in a remarkable guest role: choreographer William Forsythe
Awarded with The New Visions Award von Film+arc.Graz 1997
The year is 7079. Researcher Thomas McManus is dropped in a desert and is meant to find out about an old experiment. He gathers samples of the desert grounds and discovers the collecter, the place where the former experiment used to take place. He manages to hack into the computer of the head of the research and is stunned: instead of discovering weed and weed movements he stumbles into the team of weed researchers, or rather whats left of them.
The cult novel Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel was at one point a source of inspiration of THE WAY OF THE WEED. In Locus Solus Professor Canterei invites his guests to a tour in the large park he owns. It appears to contain an amazing amount of machines, extremely clever but self-contained with no aim in terms of what our world considers to be useful. THE WAY OF THE WEED is to be found between anti-gravitation and freezing. It is a search in the desert for new life forms in an old experiment. Roussel‘ s machines have become kaleidoscopic show-boxes.
You could see a bizarre flowering of the creative process, something which explored our contemporary visions of computer technology and the way we can be trapped within it. There was just the hint of a story – a man sent to investigate events o a barren planet – and this was enough to snatch at your fascination while inventive camera work and editing did the rest. This enigmatically sexy piece was described as a ‘study of movement‘, and who could argue with that?(Anthony Troon // The Scotsman 16.04.1998)
