Vertigo Rush

Vertigo Rush is relatively simple. There is a camera in a Scandinavian wood. It zooms in towards a clearing, and then pulls back and changes focus. Then it does again, but a little faster. Then again, and again. As it does so, the intermittent tone that is the only soundtrack becomes faster, and as the camera pushes in and out a little more quickly so too does the sound.

That's it. It keeps going until the tone is an electronic squall, while the picture is distorted into streaks and then artifacts of digital photography and then a pulsing smear. It keeps going until it passes from curiousity to tedium to nausea. The trees wave in the wind until they can't be seen as trees. The sound gets faster and faster until it ceases to be a sound, becomes a disturbance. The title seems less an attempt to categorise the film as the state it seeks to produce in the audience. It is endured rather than enjoyed. It is literally dizzying, not in the sense that a film can stun by surprising or delighting but my making audiences doubt their inner ear. If there is a line between film and art it may be that a film invites you to keep watching, if only because you might ask for a refund.

One might see in Vertigo Rush the intention to illustrate that even the most bucolic of landscapes can be used to brutalise, or to have an audience ask itself about its relation to film. In that latter case it succeeds to some extent, save that no work should have its audience enquire "why am I still watching this?" or "when will it end?".