Entropy

Entropy is a film that goes round in circles. There’s a party going on. It’s been going on for some time. People are hanging around drinking and smoking, having involved conversations about music theory and art criticism. They’re arguing with each other; they want to mean something. Ultimately no one really cares of course. The beat goes on. People in a trance, a room on a loop. Nothing’s changed in days. The monotony of all this is interrupted time and again by close-ups of computer screens and plants. A voiceover recites passages from texts on thermodynamics and entropy, their language just as high-flown as the empty dialogues of the protagonists. The two levels interact as mutual qualification and commentary. And though they seem to suggest a wider context, any attempt to haul the conversation onto the meta-level of commentary only brings it to yet another level. Just another round.

The film is cut together from countless quotations and samples, put through the mill until they lose all meaning. Song titles are co-opted, fragments of interviews decontextualized, haughty know-it-all slogans excerpted from Wikipedia entries. Ultimately there’s nothing here which is not borrowed and ruminated – and more than once. The techniques of appropriation are themselves re-appropriated. Even the second-degree thinking in Entropy is invoked from a work of art criticism. The ‘appropriation of appropriation’ is put in the mouths of others; the parcel is passed again and again. Any form of utterance that used to have any critical content becomes nothing more than an empty watchword. The game being played here is a total depletion to form.

The lifeless, woodcut characters that are obliged to speak this language stagger through highly aestheticized images in static camera shots. They ramp it up, then freak out. But everything looks great. Everything’s just right – at least that’s how it looks. Not much more than very little ever happens at absolute zero.
(Dominikus Müller)

Translation: Jonathan Blower