The Perfect Square

Summary

For twelve years, Gernot Wieland worked with an animal trainer who taught birds to fly in circles or squares. The film initially concentrates on the birds themselves. The image, reduced to the birds flying in and out of the frame, suggests how one might perceive one’s own flickering consciousness and perception. The volatile quality of trying to capture flying birds in frame intensifies the desire to confirm whether the birds indeed fly in a circle. Whereas the indexical image captured by the camera is a testament to the difficulty of training the birds to do something on command, the title of the work itself invokes the intellectual purity of geometric forms, considered superior by analytic philosophy to describe the laws of nature. All this implies that beings that disobey a command could be a definition of an "other".

The film also refers to an experimental investigation conducted by Kandinsky in 1923. He had assumed that there are direct correspondences between primary colors (yellow, red, blue) and forms (triangle, square, circle). It is by these means that "The Perfect Square" explores the question of how aesthetic and social norms influence and control our society and our artistic creation, as well as the western view of the world.

Source: 74. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)