"A Morir, Miguel Angel Rios"

I think what I really responded to in this piece was the raw power of the spinning tops. This was conveyed by a few means. The first of these was the perspective on the action. Besides the interesting fact that there were three different angles to look at simultaneously, the perspective was generally very low to the "ground" and up extremely close to the tops. As such, a whirring top could burst into the picture at any given moment, perhaps stopping perfectly and spinning right in front of you, knocking into other tops at high velocity, or whizzing right by and back out of the picture.

Besides the close up perspective, there was the quality of the sound which enhanced the sense of speed and intensity. I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice that it sounded eerily like a bombing raid being conducted overhead, with the whirring of the tops sounding much like airplane engines - first becoming louder and louder until they blew past you and the sound receded. All of this detailed surround sound led me to intimately feel the physicality of the tops.

This sense of power and motion was so palpable that I felt myself beginning to assign human characteristics to the tops. Some were larger than others and spun so quickly and with such force in one place that any smaller top which came into contact with them would quickly be blown away. These large tops seemed to me to be "proud" in the most self-satisfied sense, while the smaller tops were never as secure in their space and struck me as "timid" and afraid of their dangerous surroundings. Though the entire film is under five minutes long, near the end I was wholly engrossed in the struggles of these little beings (as I had begun to perceive them). When they slowly began to fall, their momentum withering one by one, I could not help but sense that this was an inexorable process and that their energy would not be replenished. That this would be a tragic occurence seemed a natural thought to me, and I perceived a degree of dignity in the way the last few tops stubbornly clung to motion until they hit the floor with a thud. I have to give Rios credit for getting me to so empathize with a bunch of tops and for bringing to light my own strong association between life and motion.