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SOURCE-LED EDITORIAL REVIEW

PLEASE (LC): beyond the familiar story of the living world.

PLEASE (LC) · 2016

A source-led reading of PLEASE (LC) as cinematic narrative: the living world, decision, documented consensus, and the counterpoint that shifts the conclusion.

THE FILM EDITORIAL DESKAugust 31, 2026318 WORDS
01

THEMATIC CENTER

the living world
02

NARRATIVE PRESSURE

decision
03

FORM

cinematic narrative
04

RECORD ANCHORS

video · leonard · cohen

The record for PLEASE (LC) yields three coordinates specific to its premise—video, leonard, and cohen. That vocabulary places the living world at the center and gives decision its dominant tension. It establishes a documentary baseline, not a borrowed score; criticism must still ask what the form does with that material.

PLEASE (LC) brings the living world into contact with decision through cinematic narrative. That intersection is our Fresh Take: judge the premise less by its familiarity than by how precisely that combination makes its conflict legible. The existing editorial note adds this view: A strong, singular piece of cinema driven by genuine directorial conviction.

PLEASE (LC) (2016) arrives with the coordinates of a cinema film situated in 2010s cinema. The record credits Lutz Bacher with the direction and places its documented performers in the foreground. With an undocumented running time, the useful question is not to invent an invisible intention, but to notice how these documented choices shape audience expectations before the first frame.

Read as cinematic narrative, the film carries the pressure of decision. The living world is not merely scenery: it imposes its own time, limits, and a scale that displaces human action from the center. The most precise critical test is therefore how one choice alters every option that follows. The strongest entry point is to treat the film as a connected series of decisions. Frame, duration, cast, and genre are not guarantees of success; they are the elements of a proposition whose coherence deserves examination.

The counterpoint views the characters from the landscape's perspective—as temporary presences rather than owners of the frame. Instead of asking whether the film confirms the expected story of the living world, the sharper question is whether it changes the person, place, or institution with the power to define it. The twist is to suspend the score long enough to see which of the film's decisions still resists the verdict.

THE VERDICT, REFRAMED

The takeaway: consider the film's choices before adopting the verdict around it. Here, the living world changes meaning under the pressure of decision.

THE DOCUMENTARY STARTING POINT

PLEASE (LC) is an installation which consists of the same video extract projected successively on four large screens arranged next to each other. Lutz Bacher evokes, through these few seconds staged like a canon song, the figure of singer Leonard Cohen repeating the word "please". Paradoxically, the resulting cacophony takes the form of a sweet supplication or an invitation to prayer. "Back in Los Angeles, the denser, darker cacophony of Lutz Bacher’s four-channel video PLEASE (LC) (2013–15) clamored in the dim yellow basement of 356 S. Mission Rd. A clip of Leonard Cohen peering out from a blue curtain and singing a bar was repeated in semi-random sequence across four projectors. In the center of the room rose the show’s titular Magic Mountain (2015), a head-high pile of spikey blue modules of acoustic foam. Designed to muffle the walls of a recording studio, here they weren’t absorbing much." – Travis Diehl for X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, December 2016

Original review by The Film Editorial Desk. No audience testimony or independent critic identity is fabricated.
Year
2016
Runtime
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Direction
Lutz Bacher
Performers
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