Director: Danny Perez

Danny Perez's experience as filmmaker comes largely from his productions of visualisations for live shows; digitally updating the sponge-bath liquid light show of the 1960s for contemporary acts such as Black Dice and Panda Bear. One may regard this as a portentous of the intellectual calibre of ODDSAC. Two years in the making the film is described as a collaboration between Perez and critically acclaimed American band Animal Collective. The form and structure of ODDSAC is mostly dictated by the musical compositions, which in themselves largely dominate the diagesis. It is this dominance of the soundtrack that gives ODDSAC the feel of an extended music video rather than an accomplished piece of cinema (indeed even its self proclaimed status as a 'feature film' is optimistic by the measure of ten minutes). The press release and the end credits are keen to situate ODDSAC within the imagined genre of the ‘visual album'. It is this apparently novel framework that liberates Perez from the strict necessities of narrative cinema whilst also distancing the work from traditions of the Avant-Garde. This is significant in that it is the 20th Centuary Avant-Garde to which the film bears the most similarities. It is when this comparison is [forcibly] made that the shortcomings become clear. That is to say this is not a new format at all. One has to look no further than works by filmmakers such as Derek Jarman to see how lyrical non-narrative forms can operate effectively at feature length. Or perhaps even more obvious is the work of Kenneth Anger, who is widely regarded to be one of the pioneers of popular soundtracks and experimental film. The difference is, however, that where the likes of Jarman and Anger used experimental forms to explore complex ideas on sexual politics and the occult, Perez seems disinterested in communicating anything other than a vague sense of psychedelia. It is this Vacuum of coherent ideas that reduces ODDSAC to very slight achievement which would be more at home at a rock show than a cinema.

www.oddsac.com