“The alchemists spoke of “quintessence” as the fifth, highest level of existence, the plane of ultimate reality, and The Fifth Floor suggests what it would be like to gradually ascend to this level.”

David Finkelstein, Lake Ivan Film Journal

REVIEWS

Lake Ivan Film Journal, October 20, 2025 – David Finkelstein

The Fifth Floor, a new 8 minute film by David Baeumler, juxtaposes two very different visual textures. The film begins with a four by three grid of home movies, typical footage of kids playing, exploring, getting into innocent trouble. The filmstrips of these old movies have been heavily hand-processed, covered with constantly shifting splotches and colors, as if they had been left in a trashcan for weeks and had grown moldy. These old movies are soon shown surrounded by completely abstract digital layers, compositions of colors and shapes.

Unlike many of Baeumler’s films, this one has no narration. The barebones narrative of the film consists of periodic computer-voice announcements from an elevator, letting us know that we’re arriving at floors one through five. This disembodied voice serves simply to frame the film as a journey upwards of some kind. The music, a rich tapestry of shifting orchestral colors, suggests that at each moment we are glimpsing strange and fascinating things as we ride upwards.

The abstract visual layers, filled with brilliant bands of color, mostly warmly glowing reds, yellows and oranges and set off by areas of blue and green, often suggest the sensation of gliding smoothly upwards, and add to the feeling that we are ascending towards some realization. The imagery is symmetrically reflected in kaleidoscopic patterns, although irregular ones, and the compositions play with how to set symmetrical patterns within the rectangular format of widescreen video. The sleek, stylish angles of the bands of color are reminiscent of something one might see in an Art Deco period elevator, for example in New York’s Rockefeller Center.

The decaying home movie footage suggests a time-bound, earthly plane of consciousness. Memories of the past are a constant reminder of the passage of time, and the physical decay of the film only underscores our own ephemeral nature as time-bound creatures. The abstract layers, on the other hand, suggest a timeless level of reality, some elevated plane of consciousness where the interplay of pure energy is eternal, the hidden reality behind the time-bound illusions of our earthly existence.

These two realms are not kept neatly separated in the film; they constantly overlap and interact. Layers of decaying film are seen mixed into the geometric patterns, and the bands of color are constantly seen around, under and above the film layers. The Fifth Floor suggests a multi-level form of consciousness, such as one might experience during an intense meditation session. At one level, thoughts and memories play across our mind, an experience which meditators often describe as “like watching a movie.” On another level, as our Kundalini breathing techniques slowly raise our energy from one chakra to another, ascending the ladder of consciousness, we sense a different reality, behind and underneath our daily awareness. The film might even depict a near-death experience, a person watching their life flashing before their eyes, all the while being drawn upwards, towards the light.

During the “fourth floor” of the trip, the home movie footage grows larger in the center of the screen, covered with more and more decayed blotches, and then seems to sputter out, like some kind of electrical shortage. Finally, in the quiet, elevated realms of the “fifth floor,” we see the most spectacular displays of abstract color yet, beautifully complex symmetrical patterns of serenely spinning, scintillating forms. The alchemists spoke of “quintessence” as the fifth, highest level of existence, the plane of ultimate reality, and The Fifth Floor suggests what it would be like to gradually ascend to this level.

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