Soap Membranes
/8
- Soap Membranes
- Membrane de săpun
- 1972
- Super 8 film transferred to 16 mm and digital, color, no sound
- 5min, 34sec
In 1972, on his way to the Bauhaus sites of East Germany, Constantin Flondor acquired his first movie camera, a MEOPTA Super 8, in Prague. “Soap Membranes” is his first phenomenological film, produced in 1972 immediately after returning home. The subject of his research—soap bubbles—must be read in direct correlation with his simultaneous activity as part of the Sigma Group, in which a constructivist attitude and positivist thinking generated a concern for the laws of form, taking nature as model. Exploring the interplay of soap bubbles, the tension between two, three or more “soap membranes” and their spherical conjunction, this film reflects upon the fundamental mathematical principles expressed by natural forms such as the hexagon or the rhombic dodecahedron. The analogies (to a honeycomb or to the elastic structure of a sponge) and the reductions that take place (with the soap membranes’ surface tension causing the bubbles to minimize their surface areas) reinforce the poetic and interrogative perspective on immediate phenomena so characteristic of Flondor’s and Sigma’s multi-disciplinary approach and their active efforts to capture the unseen nature of things. A.Se.