Ana Vaz’ THE AGE OF STONE is a thirty-minute short. It opens with a slow cinema conceit – a steady gaze at the sun rising over Brasilia. Then long takes of ants, structurally complex flowers. There is the constant sound of insect life, bugs flying around the lens, determined handheld camera work – a sense of the organic, the real, in all aspects. A man arrives at a quarry, in a close-up reminiscent of early cinema, eyes glistening with unnameable emotion. Traditional stonemasons cut slabs from the belly of the quarry. Slow pans reveal the presence of strange stone structures. Piece by piece over the next fifteen to twenty minutes, we get to see the whole thing – the excavation of the quarry has revealed an ancient structure in the ground. The extraction and mining have exposed the bones of the thing, standing in the sun like the bleached skeleton of a whale or the ruins of an upturned boat’s hull.
It is, in the end, a simple thing: its overt attempts at message perhaps less successful for me (being a person of a different background and identity) than the flash-fiction-like surrounding of a single speculative-fiction concept that is revealed very affectlngly and cleverly. Its slow estranging of the scene is something to study.
I watched THE AGE OF STONE on MUBI.