Last weekend, we had the privilege of being invited to a special screening at Revue Cinema of Man From Tomorrow, a film by Jacqueline Caux starring Jeff Mills.

With a running time of about 45 minutes, the film explores themes of futurism through the juxtaposition of image and music produced by Jeff Mills.

Absent of familiar devices, the movie has little for a conventional audience to hold on to. The opening scene is 5 minutes of strobe lights with slow zoom to a frozen mills centered in the frame. There is little dialogue, the narrative is non-linear and circuitous.

The film does have a clear central character though, and it is Mills himself, appearing throughout the piece.

All of these elements combine to make an esoteric art piece which instills a dreamlike state where the audience isn’t really too sure about how to process what they are seeing and feeling. At a certain point you stop trying to understand, you accept that you have to just sit back, and let the experience hit your senses.

“There’s a certain link between cities and electronic music, and obviously in the case of techno, Jeff is linked to Detroit. But beyond this, I really consider Jeff an architect of electronic music. His music is as abstract as a piece of modern architecture, but very organic also. I think the track is an absolute balance between our DNAs and between our worlds.”

— Jean-Michel Jarre when speaking about the track ‘The Architect’ in a 2016 interview with Dazed Magazine

In the question period after the screening, I asked Jeff and Jacqueline about the role of architecture in their work. I felt it grounded the film in something the audience was familiar with and could intuitively understand.

To me, Jeff’s response draws parallels with Deconstructivism, a movement popular during the early years of his career.

He said when he works, he frequently builds things up just to break them back down again to a point where the reduced product straddles a delicate balance between structure and discord.

de·con·struc·tiv·ism

Encourages radical freedom of form and the open manifestation of complexity rather than strict attention to functional concerns and conventional elements.

I think this is a fitting definition for both the film and the music of Jeff Mills. It also establishes a strong link to the environment where this music came out of.

After the screening we checked out Into The Void, a warehouse event up in the north end of The Junction where he was set to play that night. The space was in a unit within an industrial warehouse space. A grid of rectangular cinderblock rooms, filled with old mechanical equipment and a large loading dock off the back as the entrance.

I think there is something poetic about the symmetry here between the conceptual rationale behind the art, the actual happenings of the events and the selection of the venue. To me this further reinforces the fact that film, music, space and time are ultimately inseparable and units of the same universal currency.

The formats change with the medium but the underlying substance remains the same.