In honor of the 2014 Wisconsin Film Festival and the Golden Badger Awards given out to films each year, LakeFrontRow.com’s “Your Weekly Short” is getting a facelift. Plan on revisiting one Golden Badger-winning short every week through the end of the festival.
“Promiseland” is literally the sum of its parts — three of them, to be exact — although you wouldn’t immediately know it. The first shot of Chele Isaac’s 2010 video installation is actually a combination of suns rising and setting, a mash-up that slowly reveals itself rather than announces the short’s visual mechanics. From three lenses, Isaac compresses a trio of perspectives into one spliced view. Whether it’s shots of debris strewn across desert rocks or an oil painting sandwiched between mirror images of a binocular-fitted observer, “Promiseland” takes the notion of “kaleidoscopic” cinema to literal extremes.
A single gaze simply can’t do justice to the stirring images and complexities behind the American West — even when the “West” is mostly southern Wisconsin. The addition of Alfred Newman’s score from How the West Was Won and striking silhouettes of frontier folk only build on the asymmetry the title already implies, a land once promised and now full of empty promises.