Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de)
"A La Mode" is a 6.5-minute black-and-white film by American filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek. This was one of his earlier career efforts and it is an experimental film from start to finish. Unfportunately, it is not a very interesting one as such. The action is way too random and uninspired and the sound is more annoying than that it adds anything here. i cannot say I enjoyed the watch at all, but then again I am not a great experimental film at all. But I have seen some good ones nonetheless and this one here lacks structure entirely. It is also not creative in terms of creative chaos. It has no such thing. I give it a thumbs down and recommend you to watch anything else. This did not get me interested at all in the filmmaker's work.
mrdonleone
Stan Vanderbeek's A la Mode is a work of pure genius. As always, he makes use of many known things on many other levels and ways of saying other things using mutation, reformation and reviewing, thus creating something totally different. A la Mode can be seen as his piece de resistance. It uses a lot of faces we don't know and normal objects we use everyday. by building many layers with/of these things we know, he gives us the feeling we know what he's meaning with a certain scene, yet he manages to double cross us and force us to view things his way, an abnormal way perhaps, but the message is clear nevertheless: I believe Stan tried to make us acknowledge the hypocrisy in which we live, work and eat. nothing is what it seems. we trust the things we create, giving our fate to something like clothing (mode). but fashions are made and deleted everyday, so we must be careful to trust ourselves instead of something artificial as clothing. but by saying that, Stan actually tells us not to trust anything, even his movies can be falsely interpreted. if what he tells can be seen as false, how can we be sure that what he's telling is the truth? maybe the things we know are right and he's wrong... something to think about.
