the lickerish quartet (1970)
Moments in life are easily relived now. We can capture them, review them, see them in a way over and over, even play them in high speed, or in reverse. It's the rest of the experience we're missing. What about what we felt in that moment? Did we ever really feel it? Or is it, perhaps, just an imagined feeling that we wish had gone along with the moment? It all passes so quickly, all washes away so easily. Things can vanish in an instant, *snap*, like that. Visions, memories, and the futility of record; that's what makes up Metzger's masterpiece, The Lickerish Quartet. How fleeting is the imprint that memory leaves, even a film reel can't be trusted to play the same way twice in this cinematic dreamscape. Life is nothing without the meaning we attach it to it, and the meaning is everything whether life happens around it or not. This is the central mystery of Metzger's film, though it's no closer to being solved when the projector stops whirring. Rather, Metzger here, fleshes out not the answer but the question itself through the course of the film's terse 90 minutes.