An obsessive exploration of the three geometric dimensions in hopes of reaching a fourth.
Following Vortex (2015–2017), Grid (2017–2021) and Canto (2021–2022), Alexandre Alagôa appears to be pushing his structuralist cinema to the limit with XYZ (2024–2026). As with his earlier works, his focus remains on architecture’s capacity to define and construct spaces – following in the footsteps of Takashi Ito’s experiments in the 1980s. But whilst Vortex transformed the domestic setting into a labyrinth of screens and mirrors, Grid turned the skeleton of an unfinished building into an abyssal geometric back-and-forth, and Canto began with an anonymous alleyway in the backstreets of some suburb to construct a centripetal whirlwind of cubist effects, XYZ stands out as a radical culmination of a decade’s work. Radical in the sense of root. This is a film that explores the essential elements of cinema: the two-dimensionality of the image combined with the effect of depth through time. And, as one might expect, at the end of this tangle of dizzying variables, the analogue matrix of cinema is rediscovered: the projector and the celluloid film (in a digital film made without a camera). A disconcerting paradox. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa).
