Flakes

There are very much two parts to Flakes. One is an audio track that’s comprised of a subtle score and a recital of an original piece of literature concerning the heaviest of topics - the extermination of Jewish bodies during World War II and the personal feelings of a German soldier facilitating the last phase of an evil plan. The other is a kind of montage that’s supposed to give a visual element to what we’re listening to. Unfortunately it never really comes anywhere close to doing it any justice. It gets to the point where it feels more natural to mentally come up with an image than it is to take in the one we’re given.

The written work here is very good. It’s challenging and it explores a perspective on the atrocities of the war that aren’t usually looked at. The idea that good people were coerced into doing awful things is a vital part of modern history that gets pushed aside in favour of a binary narrative, that there was a good side and a bad side when the truth is clearly far more nuanced. With films like All Quiet on the Western Front getting so much attention recently, it may be that things are changing for the better in that area. Nonetheless, Flakes does a brilliant job of describing some really gruesome truths that good people would have had to battle with, and from that point of view, it’s measured, considered, and thought-provoking.

It’s a bit of a distraction that while that’s going on there are visuals that don’t add anything meaningful. It appears as if it’s mostly stock footage layered underneath stock effects, but ultimately it isn’t anything that we haven’t seen before and therefore couldn’t have just been left to come up with ourselves. To a degree, it cheapens the whole piece because when we should be thinking about the richness of the text, it’s hard not to wonder why it’s been paired with such a low-quality accompaniment.

It has to be said that it feels like this would have been more suitable just as a work of spoken word rather than a short film. It doesn’t suit the brief of creating an audio-visual experience, but rather it comes across as two separate pieces that have been pulled together into a package for reasons unknown. While it might be very well written, the extent to whether this should have ever become a film in the way that it has makes it a difficult experience.