Imago Ep.II: Symmetry

Dani Joss’ ‘Imago Ep.II: Symmetry’ is a powerful conceptualisation of reality and its inhabitants. Playing with philosophical concepts and artistic movements the film is a powerful intellectual experimental reconstructing (or rather deconstructing) reality.

The film is one of the most interesting cinematic philosophical visions we’ve encountered so far in our festival. To summarise, an ‘architect’ (called The Engineer by the director) is watching the behaviour of the entities he has created in the environment he has created for them.

As a philosophical experimental this one offers a large spectre of interpretations. Perhaps the most in handy interpretation one can give is the reference to the Creation. The being is called an ‘imago’ – which is usually the last stage of the metamorphosis of an insect (defined by the actual emerging insect) – and its creation is deconstructed in 3 stages: the creation of the empty form or shape (the effigy), offering the shape the opportunity to endow itself with the features of an original in order to exist (the concept of simulacra) and the resulted being learning to accommodate the features it has acquired and replace the original (representamen).

As the imago becomes accustomed with the environment in which it got ‘born’ and starts to discover itself (herself in our case) she learns about her past. It is less important whether the past presented to her is real or not, what it is important is that she is being exposed to travelling between different realities, where she begins to know herself and learns how to confront her fears; apparently by doing this she gains the ability to shape her own reality and future… and past. In other words she learns how to shape her own destiny. Along her journey she receives clues and indications that help her understand the mechanisms of the environment surrounding her. For the imago as for the audience, its existence is a game of interpretation. The Engineer and the “Interpretant” – as the imago is called – look to us like an obvious sending to divinity and the condition of man.

Dani Joss’ film can of course suffer different other interpretations according to one’s own way of reading symbols and metaphors. ‘Imago Ep.II: Symmetry’ is a mind maze but nevertheless a fascinating one. The director’s power to fantasise, abstractise and reconstruct (deconstruct) the world ideologically is outstanding.

This is one film that certainly has the power to take one on a far-away journey among ideas and reasons.