Less successfully, the film contains way too much exposition (even without the flipchart!), in the style of some Russian epic from the 60s — I’ll be surprised if it makes it to American multiplexes without some trimming down. The music supervision also jarred: it was nice to see Basement Jaxx turning up for the premiere, but their music — and that of Oakenfold and the rest — on the soundtrack made no sense thematically or emotionally, and seemed to be just a hook for an international audience.

But if you can ignore the turgid moralising — which just slows down the action — the 3D animation and design (the mecha are great, while the Mobile Fortresses out-scale any city-stomping weapons platform I can remember) is stunning. All the big fast things were perfect. Go see it at a big cinema with decent Dolby when it’s on release next month, or get it on DVD (evidently scheduled for July) and turn up the sub-woofer.

I’ve been hunting The Fourth Dimension since Tokyo. Tim saw it at (I may be wrong) Image Forum, and made it sound a thing worth tracking down. That was probably 13 years ago. The DVD set, including all the above and many more, arrived over the weekend.

So far, The Fourth Dimension is the treasure. It looks rendered, but given that it was made in 1988, I guess it’s most likely built using exquisite compositing, anamorphic lenses and motion control damped with several hundred tonnes of concrete. Unfortunately, the transfer suffers from streaky video artifacts and a washed-out palette, suggesting that the DVD was dubbed from laserdisk rather than digital or cine master. It’s also a shame the DVDs come with no notes other than a ‘making of’ for Orchestra. In fact, the whole package feels a bit thrown together. But given that these films seem to have been unavailable for years, it’s nice to have them in any form. Can’t help wondering if the ones originated in Hi-Vision will be rereleased in a more modern HD format sometime soon.

Zbig is quoted as having a systems approach to his film-making:

“l am only an observer”, Rybczynski explained, “I planned the operation and watch what would come out of it”.

All the films, to my eye, are much improved by watching them patiently, settling into the mood with the sound off, as ambient video art.

There are plenty of reviews of them around, pointing out the influences of Tati, Antonioni and the rest. But to me, the spirit of both films was more in the vein of Chris Morris: the long, weird scene with the smoking man at the row of urinals, the sinuous, nut-crunching girl, and much else in the feature, and the dénouement (if you could call it that) of the short could easily have been lifted straight from (a rather more formalist) Jam. Although seeing this bleak, sylised humour in an Asian film, I’m left wondering how much Morris himself has been influenced by the dark Japanese ‘comedies’ of the early Eighties, with their complex setups of social disconnection which lead nowhere, their pratfalls of nothingness tripping clumsily over itself…