Mixing phantasmagorical effects, electronic music and the wisdom of great thinkers, Cognition Factor is not meant for the faint at heart.
By FilmStew Staff, FilmStew.com
For his first feature-length film, South African Mike Kawitzky spent ten years, off and on, tracking down consciousness experts such as Terrence McKenna, John Shirley and Dr. Ralph Metzner. He also spent six months working on the 3D visual effects that are interspersed with the talking heads. The result is the 64-minute cosmic travelogue Cognition Factor, which sneak previewed this past weekend at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.
"The film is a cyberpunk's search for consciousness," Kawitzky tells the Mail & Guardian newspaper. "Some people hate my movie because it is not a subject that everybody wants to grasp."
To frame his exploration of discussion topics such as whether or not there is a God, and what happens to humans after they die, Kawitzky sampled the music of electronica bands such as The Shamen, The Orb and Ozrick Tentacles. A local South African musician, Indidginus, helped Kawitzky with this important aspect of the film.
Mail & Guardian reporter James Loudon writes that Cognition Factor "delivers a full-scale assault on the senses" and is a bit like a Discovery Channel program run through a visualizer and for which "the soundtrack has been taken over by aliens." Kawitzky has a much more modest description of his film's 3D effects, labeling them as "state of the art cheese." All in all, despite the very solemn topics of the film, he seems to have avoided taking himself too seriously.
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