What I see I say what I see, nothing more - after all, this is the avant-garde - I interpret it as I want.
In the first minutes, nothing was clear until the first object appeared, with which I connected the running white balls. This object is a cube, which is divided into another, more miniature. The number of the first 1 and the second is also 1. A kind of Gestalt philosophy, where the cube is seemingly a gestalt (whole), which fits all the chaos occurring on the screen, but later the author points to the ambiguity of the idea.
Bruce Conner began as a painter and eventually went to the cinema. In this film, I liked a slight similarity with the style of Francis Bacon, in which Gilles Deleuze and Jonathan Littel found one of its main features, namely the isolation of worlds by the artist through various figurative abstractions, for example, in the picture Head VI (1949) “screaming dad” is imprisoned in a cube. By the same principle, we can say, sharpened and Marilyn Monroe in another film Conner Marilyn Times Five (1968-1973). The director skillfully uses the found footage to show it as a sex figure of the twentieth century, became a symbol, just as today Colonel Sanders is a commercial symbol of the fast food chain after his death.
Transferring the reception of the English Expressionist to the film Mea Culpa, it is clear that the cube exists in the form of an abstraction that draws its limits of confinement for “white balls”, but not for everyone, some exist outside it. Later I will explain why this is, but I will say right away, we see 3 cubes on the screen at the same time, but if you look at it as a mathematical model, then thousands and tens of thousands, etc.
In the middle of the film, meaning is laid in the “white balls” themselves, placing positive and negative charges in them. And then the idea of the cycle of energy itself gets into the tongue. If you transpose the symbols in the film to the existing world, it turns out that the cube is anything from the sun and the copper wire that turns on the light bulb, to an animal and a person that releases and absorbs heat in the form of "white balls", or energy; that the mechanism that throws energy up and down, which appears at any convenient opportunity - is an analogy with the reproducibility of energy, something even like a perpetual motion machine. But as I have already said about the ambiguity of the author’s idea, when near the end of the film he erases the same cube, leaving the “white balls” on a fictitious freedom (since the cube is an irrational idea), there is an induction approach – we have moved from the “world of individualities or relativity” to the “world in general or general”. This author erases the first whole, that is, the cube, and puts forward a more general gestalt, most likely under the same nomenclature - "1", from which, if you fly further as in "Cosmic Voyage" (1996), you can see exactly the same cube, but to move on to a more general does not make sense, the latter will erase the preceding and so to infinity (if someone suddenly thought of the world as not a whole, which is possible).
Energy, as it were, consolidates the world.
9 out of 10