Reviews

"Angerame’s experiment with stroboscopic cinema, a kind of trance film inspired by Theodore Roszak’s novel Flicker, interweaves eroticism and orientalism anew in the ecstatic performance of a dancer (Zhanna Kleiman) before the camera. Kleiman is exposed naked in the flickering light, percussive composition, and Angerame’s frenetic montage, which merges its protagonist (literally from top to bottom) into a vision that flows seamlessly from the concrete to the abstract and back into the concrete. This montage layers the ritualistic movement studies of the heroine’s body within each other so that they attain an artificial, graphic quality."

from an article by Stefan Grissemann

"Set mostly to a soundtrack of chant and percussion, Consume displays an idea of ritual, a concept of dance, and depicts the elusive power of the projected image."

from Flickhead review by Ray Young

This powerful, compelling film depicts a trance state from a radically subjective point of view. It is the only film I've ever seen which manages to convey so strongly what it feels like, from the inside, to enter into such a state."

from Film Threat review by David Finkelstein

“Dominic Angerame's CONSUME represents a successful example of using formal strategies. The black and white film focuses on the rhythmic movements of a female dancer. The image of the dance appears in layers, superimposed over itself, and has a soft, tactile quality. As the film progresses, the contrast in the image increases, until finally it transforms into abstract black and white shapes. The movement from legibility to abstraction and back again creates a visceral experience, one that is underscored by the percussion-based soundtrack. CONSUME captures the fickle nature of memory: concrete and clear, partial and blurred, intense and fleeting.”

Dina Ciraulo

"By way on an elegant invocation of the merely probable meanings of lost histories and ethnic otherness as manifest in the hand signalings of a dancing muse rippling towards us as if to kiss the head of a king cobra, we're soon left floating and alone only to realize -- and here is the rub, that the king and not beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and this, being you, the viewer, is about to be torn apart like the yearling consorts of great antiquity.

A bloody good time is to be had for all. After setting us up at the haunted banquet of all but lost meanings, we're given just enough time to realize that we're the gypsies, the gypsies of love lost and shredded contexts. And we're drawn out of the shadowy curtains of the far east, out of Indonesia, through Sufiland and the Great Hungarian Plain, past the Ukraine and into Africa again, thrown in some Cuba and Haitian Voodoo, if you will, until you realize eventually that it is you who've become the subject of this dissembling smorgasbord down the gullible and into the belly of the beast we go, down, going down for the count of love…

Before you can scarcely catch your breath, suddenly the feast and is bleeding and you're bloody it. You're fully awake now and love's tearing you apart. Your body is becoming the Serenghetti of appetite, in savageness, the ground of being itself alive, eating itself numb into satiety, blindness, night. Just hang on. This too shall pass out. Wake up and smell the coffin. Egypt can't be that far off. The bottom line. The ground floor of the pyramid scheme. You can count on Isis in a crisis, brother. She'll have you in stitches come the Spring. Limbs rise up laughing with the disinterred perfumes of loss and renewal. But right now you'll have to chill into something Tibetan. And remember to say tanka. Tankas for everything. And Kaliuga to you too, yearling. And yes, I'm happy to have been of use. Bon appetit. And I didn't really know, it нs true, that I could be a twelve course meal for you. You all, I mean. No, I promise, nothing personal. I won't take any of this personally. Let's keep it simple. Whatever it takes then, after all, to be restored to this throne of blood and light."

Ronald F. Sauer

"The film portrays really well the metamorphosis of the individual into a sort of resonanting form of energy released from its body and completely unaware of its surroundings...the trance state that is induced after listening to mind-altering music for some period of time. The movements, girations, and expressions look as if the body is reproducing every layer of the music, and after seeing this for a while, I can almost hear the music just by watching the trancedance. The visuals of the woman in motion are perfectly in tune with the shamanic tribal music in the background. Almost as if she was a visual plugin for some audio media player...especially when the body becomes destorted in the black/white sequence to the point that all you see is remnants of a human form, as if she had merged with the aid of the trance music into the surrounding medium and was just a vibration in the fabric of spacetime. "

Leo Goldfine