Briefly: what's it going to be like?
A kind of audience activating, structured film game in the manipulation of time, sound and image. But a lot funnier than that sounds.
In more detail:
Robert Nelson's 1970 film is a pretty funny yet serious meditation on cinematic time and is concerned primarily with the structural side of the structuralist/ materialist equation. Made around the same time as Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma it's an equally direct challenge to the film viewer to participate in the what they are seeing. Bleu Shut's guessing game manages to allow different clips of film to remain just what they are (home movies, adverts etc) while giving the task of synthesizing them into a whole ‘film' over to you the viewer, while still playing with your sense of time with both an aleatory aesthetic and a sense of humor.
"Even when we know the game is an illusion, the experience of Bleu Shut is entirely a pleasure: the ‘game' is fun, the Nelson/Wiley debates, infectiously funny; and Nelson's choice of imagery, quirky and amusing. Bleu Shut reveals, and allows us to enjoy, our gullibility within the pervasive absurdity of modern life." (Scott MacDonald)
