What Goes Up.... (2003)
I'll be straight with you: avant-garde cinema and I have never really got on. It's not a prejudice I'm particularly proud of, but it's an honest one. So when I sat down with Robert Breer's 2003 experimental short What Goes Up..., I already knew I was setting myself a challenge. What I didn't quite anticipate was just how completely and thoroughly it would lose me.
The thing is, this film has somehow secured a spot on the "They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?" top 1000 films of the 21st century list. That's a prestigious company to keep. And I respect the critical tradition behind that list enormously. But sitting here on the other side of the experience, I genuinely struggled to locate whatever it is that earned this short film its place among the century's best.
What Breer is doing, at least intellectually, is interesting enough to describe. He's working through what critics call a "kitchen sink" approach, cramming disparate visual elements together to probe at cinema's dual nature: the illusion of movement versus the cold reality of a succession of still frames. There's thematic tension around failure and failed aspirations woven in there somewhere too, apparently. And I'll take the critics' word for it, because on a pure viewing level, what I actually experienced was something closer to a hyperactive barrage of abstract shapes, clashing colours, and jarring stop-motion rhythms that felt less like a profound meditation on the medium and more like someone had spliced together a decade's worth of late-night MTV channel outros and dared me to find meaning in it.
That's not entirely fair to Breer, and I know it. The man's lifelong dedication to exploring the mechanical and rhythmic possibilities of film is not something I'm going to dismiss. The sheer ambition here is undeniable. There's a genuine, ecstatic energy being pumped into every frame, and I can recognise, even admire, the commitment it takes to work this way. But recognising ambition and actually connecting with a film are two very different things, and What Goes Up... never once gave me a handhold to grab onto.
Without any narrative to speak of, the film asks you to surrender entirely to its rhythms and textures. For viewers wired for that kind of engagement, I imagine this is thrilling stuff. For me, it was an exercise in patience that I ran out of fairly quickly. The colours are undeniably vibrant. The energy is relentless. But relentless isn't always a compliment, and by the time I was waiting for the whole thing to end, I felt less enlightened and more exhausted.
There's a version of me that wishes I could sit with this kind of work and let it wash over me the way it's clearly designed to. I genuinely do. And I'm not going to pretend this is a bad film in some objective, universal sense. The avant-garde faithful will find plenty to celebrate here, and the critical consensus suggests they already have. But for the rest of us, the ones who watch films looking for some kind of accessible human experience to latch onto, What Goes Up... is a bewildering, colourful puzzle that offers very little in return for your time and attention.
One star. Bold, bizarre, and absolutely not for me.
Rating: ★ | Year: 2003 | Watched: 2026-07-08
