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Entropy Machine is an ambient narrative which is, of course, a coinage: a way of boiling down the aura and the poetics you receive from the immersive long take—where the camera is locked in a specific position and casts a passive gaze at a scene. A deceptively passive gaze at that, having to do with making itself more vulnerable to the intrusion of epiphany—approaching a purer catharsis unencumbered by the dictates of coverage, and at the very least an unmediated taking in of place, as if the milieu itself were part of the epiphany—if not the epiphany itself, which in many ways, it is. The film critic André Bazin always thought the technique, if you could even call it that, was intensely contemplative. And given the nature of the work and the dynamics of the space and of its potential audience, it ultimately is.

Structuralist in rigor and denied both the disruption and commentary of a cut or a pan or a zoom or any manner of flourish, you get a sense that the static frame is a limiter—that it hems the universe it creates in, but this eventually becomes liberating and a relief. The actor enters the frame with a minimal list of tasks to do within it and the lassitude to choose the pace at which he will perform them and block his own movements. It’s improv, ultimately, and is, like all improv, a wresting of control from the imposing parameters of the frame as it surrenders itself to vicissitude, to a sort of intelligent design if you will, in which the method and philosophy achieve a symmetry.

Entropy Machine resonates with Abstraction of Beasts firstly in its affinity with taxonomy as the giving of shape to the ungraspable, and literally to the way an Adam surrogate figures in it; Adam being the primordial taxonomist of course, but there’s resonance, too—in the sense that, as an impetus and as a work, it similarly fixates on nature as a tributary to super nature, on science as a conduit to myth, on its verdant milieu, specific yet obtuse, being some kind of point where science and magic overlap. Entropy Machine has been described as a caveman movie about the world. And that’s not being flippant in any way. The Eden metaphor is deliberate. But remember that Eden is its own double-edged sword: it’s paradise and crime scene both, and as such, is the beginning of decay. The heart, if you will, of the entropy machine.