Sister Cities Review
Film International Issue 29 / Volume 5, Number 5 / pp 6-7
Liza Palmer's 'Film Scratches'


Sister Cities (2006) is quite simply a marvellous film. It is rare to find a piece these days that is so self-contained and yet limitless in its design, format and execution. But Joe Merrell has achieved just that. Indeed, it should come as no surprise to this reviewer, who critiqued his Corner, Los Angeles (2005) for an earlier installment of 'Film Scratches' (Film International, 4.3, 2006). Like Corner, Los Angeles - which is an equally strong film and one worth seeing, particularly in tandem with this newer work - Sister Cities demonstrates an interest in the concepts of layering and overlapping, but explores them in a decidedly refreshing and satisfying manner: anaglyphs. What results is fabulously layered images, when viewed through the appropriate 3-D lenses.

The subject of the images is quotidian yet evocative - the heterogeneity of Los Angeles inscribed on-screen in soft grayscale, many parts forming a single whole. Merrell, in his film description states:

The central symbol of the piece is the Sister Cities signpost, located near City Hall. Rather than marking a spot or providing immediately useful information, the Sister Cities signpost points outwards in many directions to places thousands of miles away. In this sense it represents an important characteristic of Los Angeles - a sort of center without a center, a place in many ways defined by its diversity.

Sister Cities' approach, in fact, is reminiscent of Bruce Baillie's Castro Street (1966) - the vitality of a neighbourhood communicated sensorally. The film begins with beautiful images of clouds, inching across the frame. The motion is subtle and alluring - a motion later belied, however, by successive images that teach the viewer that the 'kineticity' of the film is rendered solely through camera movement over stills and the anaglyphic effect; the energy originates within - but eventually and stunningly spills over - the frame. Some of the images are punctuated by dazzling glimpses of sunlight, asymptotic flash frames that prefigure the dramatic, dynamic ending. There is at one point a radiant, lush shot of water bubbling up, limned by sunlight. Merrell's elemental imagery is striking.

Approximately six minutes in, the images start to blur as if unable to check the frame's energy. This transitions, around the seventh minute, to a sequence of nighttime images, engraved by light - approaching and ultimately ending on a frame of brilliant white. It would seem almost that Merrell, in his Sister Cities, is describing the trajectory of a day, from sublime cloud-filled morning to a joyous, Brakhagian symphony of painted light on dark that bleeds to total white - suggesting the beginning of the cycle, the birth of day again.

-Liza Palmer