
Indefinite Pitch
A nice intellectual exercise, which also opens up our imagination, going from geography to the mythology of cinema and back, with the explicit intention of binding them.
Screenings at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2019
Indefinite Pitch is a brilliant meditation on what a film project can mean, on how indefinite the distinction is between a project and product. Indefinite Pitch seems to be a pitch itself, then a short film on pitching, but finally a film that doesn’t want to be a film or a pitch. We see only video stills of a river, the Androscoggin, in New Hampshire. The voice-over tells us about the territory of this river, connecting Wikipedia information and personal memories. Indefinite Pitch is an anthropological study of the American province and it is a geo-historical spoken cartography of a specific town: Berlin. Actually, Berlin in New Hampshire. Thus, Indefinite Pitch is equally the story of misunderstandings, of imagination, of folk stories, of fake identities: of nothing but cinema. The Masked Menace, a 1927 drama film serial shot in Berlin, New Hampshire, plays a pivotal role in connecting James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ current filming and the legends engraved in and around Berlin. Indefinite Pitch is a film about water and fire, about the paper production that constituted the economy of this place, about its recent prison and its crimes. It is also a formal inquiry on un-synchronisation, on sound deformation, on movement in video stills: on nothing but cinema. A nice intellectual exercise, which also opens up our imagination, going from geography to the mythology of cinema and back, with the explicit intention of binding them.
Text: Giuseppe Di Salvatore
First published: August 11, 2016
Indefinite Pitch | Short Film | James N. Kienitz Wilkins | USA 2016 | 23’ | Festival del film Locarno 2016 | Fuori concorso: Shorts