Max Hattler’s Serial Parallels: Review & Interview
Max Hattler’s new piece, Serial Parallels is as soothing as it is dizzying. The experimental film shows Hong Kong’s built environment in parallel strips. The camera darts from building to building and jump cuts closer and further away, almost like a CCTV camera would zoom in and out quickly. Perhaps the speed of passing from one building to the other reflects how fast these places are being built. Hong Kong, sometimes known as the “The vertical city”, is in the midst of a housing crisis, meaning tower block flats are increasing in number and are a very common sight. Max Hattler has fused together the ordinary with the alien and has made something transfixing out of the mundane concrete constructions we see everyday. Serial Parallels evoked in me thoughts about the high density of the population. It is always discombobulating trying to fathom the masses of people living in all of those flats. All with their individual lives, hopes, dreams, washing lines! The windows look so tiny I feel as though I’m looking at toy flats for toy people.
The pastel colours and simple block shapes are sweet and clean and I feel at ease viewing. There are no surprises in the video. The perpetual motion of the windows passing through the frame is hypnotic and steady. The experience is like a meditative journey, in which you let go of control and become immersed in the flowing and rushing buildings. The sounds are reminiscent of the kinds of things you would encounter in an urban landscape; motors, helicopters, scraping cement and the warm ticking of a film reel playing. The pace of the sound and visuals create a mesmerising, abstracted view of Hong Kong. The parallel strips are often travelling in different directions and the camera tilts make it feel as though the buildings are looming in closer or slowly falling backward. A disorientating experience that is firmly oriented in Hong Kong with a strong sense of time and place. I’m not sure what’s sideways or moving up or down but at the same time I know what I’m looking at. You can enjoy getting lost in “Serial Parallels” and you might find a fresh appreciation for that block of flats you’ve always ignored.
Conversation with Max Hattler
What sparked the idea for this piece?
Ever since moving from London to the extremely condensed vertical cityscape of Hong Kong I was thinking how I could translate my new habitat into an appropriate moving image form. Serial Parallels tackles Hong Kong’s urban environment through the lens of film animation, by considering the city’s high-rise buildings as series of film strips, which each floor or window corresponding to a film frame. One of my students was making a film about Hong Kong’s cityscape and I suggested this approach to her, but in the end she didn’t go for it. So I figured I should do it myself.
Was there a particular feeling or mood you wanted Serial Parallels to evoke in the audience?
I wanted to convey a sense of the extremely repetitive nature of Hong Kong’s urban environment. Especially the public housing estates all follow a relatively small palette of architectural typologies. This city has the highest rental prices on the planet, so for many obtaining a tiny, subsidised public housing flat is the greatest blessing, but it also means they might never be able to afford to move house again. Serial Parallels tries to capture this oppressive state, while at the same time celebrating the colours and patterns of this unique urban environment.
You’re known for your live audio visual performances, how important was the audio in this film? What were the sounds of?
Sound is very important in setting the overall mood of a repetitive, mechanistic urban space. The soundscape is based on field recordings of Hong Kong that are heavily modulated at frequencies that match the frame rate of the film to create a projector-like whirr, and sonically illustrate the multi-layered movements of interconnected, morphing concrete structures, moving machines for living.
What brought you to the process of collage, film and pixilated animation?
Serial Parallels is based on the re-animation of large-format photographs. Only 240 photos are used in the whole 9-minute film. No collage, no pixilation.
Hong Kong is a densely populated part of the world, was it your intention to communicate this in your film?
Most definitely.
UK audiences can catch Serial Parallels on the big screen at Encounters Film Festival (Bristol, 24-29 Sep) in the International Competition, while upcoming international screenings include Kaboom Animation Festival (Netherlands, 9-17 Nov), and Stoptrik International Film Festival (Slovenia, 3-6 Oct). Additionally, the exhibition – Max Hattler. Receptive Rhythms – will be taking place at the Goethe-Institut, Hong Kong, until the 28th September 2019