Sunrise Dacapo

Almost 60 years ago, avantgarde filmmaker DA Pennebaker shot and edited the legendary short DAYBREAK EXPRESS, a bold trailblazer of a film both pre-cursing editing rhythms of music videos and paving the way for more sensual, non-narrative shorts.

 

You can feel a breeze of Pennebaker’s mood blowing through DoP Nina Poppe's finely tuned study of images, sounds and editing. This time it's not an elevated train rumbling through the outskirts into a city, bringing the sunrise with it; this time its potted plants on conveyor belts. But the sense of movement and development is the same.

 

As we go through different stations, seamlessly connected without the sense of something being sped up, through earth being poured into flower pots, seedlings being added, artificial rain, right up to the blooming of the flowers, this feels very much like the titular sunrise. Pennebaker contrasted nature's beauty with the banality of man-made objects, decrepit buildings, empty streets and wobbly train cars; in SUNRISE DACAPO we gradually understand the industrial scope of the process: flower pot after flower pot, row after row, pallet after pallet, hundreds, thousands of plants on hundreds, thousands of square feet – a massive greenhouse, as far as the eyes can see. And when the flowers start to bloom in an explosion of colour, blinding the viewer with excessive beauty and glory, it almost seems too much to bear. Just like DAYBREAK EXPRESS, this short film cannot be properly described, it has to be experienced.

 

Poppe is very smart in slowly unveiling the ambiguousness of this almost completely mute setting: starting with only robotic devices handling the flowers, then introducing human arms coming in from the side of the frames, then electric carts with people whirring around in the background, until we finally can distinguish individual people tending individual plants. It is the most impersonal, industrial environment imaginable, and yet there is beauty being produced here. Outside there are sheep and highways and high voltage poles, oblivious of the sun that just dawned within this huge structure. There is is again, the contrast between the glorious beauty of nature and the banality of a world shaped by human architecture. Somehow they're both only interesting when combined properly.

 

Interview with Nina Poppe

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