Elevated Shores
This new work by former Erwin Rado award-winner (Long Shadows, 1992) is a masterpiece of over a decade's worth of concentrated experimentation into the boundaries of possibility in optical printing and motorised matte-box techniques. Returning again to Sydney Harbour and its environs, Winkler has pushed cinema form as though it were some atomic experiment to a nearly perfectly controlled and behaved fragmentation of optical particles. Like the dozens of finger-like, splinter-like inlets, and the jagged foundations of the harbour upon which the shore-side city is raised - elevated - Winkler's frame is a constant ravishment of kaleidoscopic cycles. It is of water, of dazzle, of urban featurism fusing into subtropical bush; of a beauty unrivalled in Australian cinema of any sort in recent years. A natural climax to any programme of experimental cinema, only a recuperative darkness can follow the light of Elevated Shores.