Rumours

Since his out-of-nowhere debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital in 1988, Winnipeg-based director Guy Maddin has become synonymous with a very particular brand of cinema, a body of work so unique and axiomatic that, were his films more widely known, they would have by now settled into adjectival status, alongside Davids Lynch and Cronenberg. Maddin’s cinema draws inspiration from many quarters, but perhaps the most profound ingredient is his return to the formal language and permeable atmosphere of the silent era. Harking back to the “primitive” efforts of Méliés, Robert Wiene, Abel Gance, and Segundo de Chomón, Maddin’s cinema suggests a different historical trajectory, in which pantomime, color tinting, iris-ins and iris-outs, and an obvious, Expressionistic artifice, all won out over Griffith’s self-contained bourgeois fictions.

In recent years, Maddin has been making films with the Johnson brothers, Evan and Galen, whose complex visual manipulations have helped bring Maddin’s approach into more direct conversation with the post-Brakhage avant-garde, introducing warping effects, frame burns, and end flares, all offering an even more precise punctuation for Maddin’s singular style. The three filmmakers’ collaboration has thus far produced at least one masterwork, The Forbidden Room, a shapeshifting, labyrinthine opus that recalls the narrative conundrums of Borges.

And now, these Canadian tricksters offer us something if not completely different, certainly from the deeper recesses of the left field. For anyone coming to Rumours as an aficionado of Maddin and the Brothers Johnson, the first thing they’ll notice is how drastically little their latest work resembles their previous films. No flash frames, no irises, no early cinema pastiche. One of the early shots, introducing the chateau locale of the G7 summit, has the font and symmetry of Wes Anderson, and many of the subsequent shots, with their fogged atmosphere and gentle color palette, most closely resemble what may be the most stylistically divergent (and ambivalently received) film in Maddin’s filmography, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. So okay, what the hell is going on here?

Rumours is the story of a particularly ill-fated meeting of the seven leaders of the industrial world, who have been charged with drafting a single collective statement about “the current crisis,” an empty political signifier that the film gradually fills to the brim. What’s at stake [SPOILER, but not if you’ve ever watched the news] is the end of the human race, and for the most part these leaders face it with the same plummy, forced optimism they’d bring to the World Bank. If politics is the art of the possible, Maddin and the Johnsons depict it as the province of the pointless, an exercise in officiousness and vainglory that at times resembles nothing so much as a summer camp for middle-aged aristocrats.

This may go some way toward explaining why Rumours’ visual approach and sound design depart from the “Maddinesque.” There’s very little overt magic (cinematic or otherwise) in this film, and that void has been filled by paranoia and repulsive glad-handing. This is both a rambling boardroom joke and the worst-ever season of MTV’s Real World: seven technocrats were lost in the woods, and you won’t believe what happened next! And unlike a lot of Maddin’s earlier work or his recent collaborations with the Johnsons, Rumours lacks overt hysteria or hit-of-nitrous immediacy. Instead, it’s a slow burn. It takes some time to see exactly where our power-suited Justice League is taking us.

As we gradually realize, the film’s stylistic austerity is in keeping with the neoliberal swing of things, the sense that democracy is a construct that can only be preserved, to an extent, by passing resolutions and applying some bastardized notion of equal protection under the law. By placing these leaders in mortal danger, we see what the political class is actually made of. Squaring off against some zombies who’ve sprung from the German property where the summit is being held — Freudian fascism’s return of the repressed — Canadian PM Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis) hides a baseball bat behind his back. He provides a land acknowledgment, telling the undead that he respects that they are the Indigenous keepers of the grounds they work on, before taking their heads off. In the words of the late Australian career criminal Jack Karlson, “this is democracy manifest.”

The leaders, like so many scions of the First World, are privileged babies. We discover that Laplace is still nursing wounds over an abortive fling with British PM Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird). The American president (Charles Dance), inexplicably British and actually quite reminiscent of Prince Philip, contemplates his inevitable fade into the sunset. (Autostraddle‘s Drew Burnett Gregory calls him “British accent Biden,” which is dead-on.) And rocking a vaguely Angela Merkel vibe, Cate Blanchett plays the German chancellor as flirty and a little attention-starved. French president Sylvain Broulez (the great Denis Ménochet) winds up pontificating from a wheelbarrow, for reasons best left unexplained. And in a late discovery, EU attaché Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander) is taking orders from a giant brain in the woods, convinced that a new political order is on the rise. (The others think she’s speaking gibberish, but in fact it’s just Swedish.)

Once you get past the initial confusion of how little Rumours looks like a “Guy Maddin film,” aside from a few digital light bleeds and a predilection for darkness, it becomes possible to see exactly what the three filmmakers are up to, and perhaps why the film has gotten a mixed reception in some quarters. It would be easy to throw a manqué dictator like Trump up on the screen to milk the predictable guffaws. (This is also true in real life, where reports from a G20 summit suggested that Boris Johnson, Justin Trudeau, and Emmanuel Macron were cracking wise about Diaper Don.) But Maddin, Johnson, and Johnson, Canadian to the bone, are more interested in taking aim at the fecklessness of liberal democracy, the administrative state, and the pious myth of good government. It’s not by chance that it’s Prime Minister Leplace who gazes straight into the abyss and welcomes the apocalypse with a well-chosen line from Neil Young. Sorry, humankind! There’ll be no more rockin’ in the free world. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

A Traveler’s Needs

Engaged in a lengthy process of simultaneous expansion and refinement, the indefatigable Hong Sang-soo seems to practice a new, yet knowingly familiar, alchemy with each successive project. He’s directed nine films since the start of this decade, each more stubbornly sparse and casually ornate than the last. As his pool of collaborators shrinks steadily in size (Hong now takes on every technical role except sound design), the emotional and textural scope of his cozily specific worlds continues to dilate. The first of the director’s two releases this year, A Traveler’s Needs, marks a return to some of the sites of wonder and estrangement that made him a critical darling in the 2010s, but it’s also the work of an artist emphatically concerned with finding ways for visual, aural, and linguistic modes of expression to be developed and pushed forward. 

As the amateur French instructor Iris (Isabelle Huppert) drifts through a day’s worth of appointments and entanglements in Seoul, these sequential encounters begin to bleed into each other, and the film folds its temporal patterns of experience in on themselves without noticeably breaking its chronology and flow (sound familiar?). Huppert’s welcoming aura of detached candor and curiosity — by this point slightly alien to Hong’s richly desiccated frames — gives the proceedings an uncharacteristically sturdy center, throwing the usual alignments of his ensemble deliberately askew. 

Iris’ lessons consist of conversations in semi-fluent English with her students, which lumber genially toward engagements with artistry; poetic inscriptions and shaky musical interludes in turn trisect her wanderings, unearthing emotions of unease and resentment that she transcribes for them in French once coaxed out. The rationale for her off-kilter pedagogy is that people are more inclined to memorize, and hopefully internalize, phrases that are emotionally significant to them, even though they may be difficult to understand. 

“I hope it works,” she admits to her second clients — Won-ju (Lee Hye-young) and husband Hae-soon (Kwon Hae-yo) — after they share numerous bottles of Makgeolli, prompting a well-earned cross-examination by a woman who objects to being a guinea pig. In this case, the limits of communicating through mediatory English (which visibly hinders mutual expression elsewhere) works in Iris’ favor; Huppert’s ability to almost imperceptibly morph confusion into confidence through her intonations belies the fact that her character has no idea what she’s saying. By the end of Iris’ visit with the couple, they are both bewitched and mystified by her distinctive presence, and have paid her well for it. Iris — patient and pushy in equal measure — probes the various pressure points that language exposes, bridging the gaps between expression and understanding.

Whether her methods produce results or not is, of course, beside the point. A pivot away from her newfound vocation toward the cross-generational codependency she shares with her roommate (Ha-seong-guk) casts Iris’ mystical qualities, and the trammels of miscommunication in which she is tangled, in a new light. Iris becomes a subject of suspicion for the young man’s mother, who claims that Iris could be lying about her background and intentions. Her son sees right through this desperate, obvious bid to stave off perceived surrogacy, but in the context of Huppert’s subconscious equivocations, her line of questioning is relevant in ways that neither of them can grasp. 

The resilience of human connection in the face of discord — stemming more often from shared fluency than failed linguistic exchange — shines through here, particularly in the moments when body language supersedes what can’t be verbally expressed. As chatty as anything else Hong has made in recent years, A Traveler’s Needs is underpinned by a deep sense of physicality, dramatizing the difficulty — and playfully questioning the necessity — of taking people at their word. — ALEXANDER MOONEY

Afternoons of Solitude

Why is it that in the nation of Spain, a nation whose siestas evince a clear cultural supremacy over their efficiency-imprisoned neighbors, regularly invites very shiny men to pierce and kill bulls in front of a cheering audience? The Iberians have long defended the corrida de toros, or bullfight, against accusations of barbarism from Enlightenment intellectuals and of animal cruelty from liberalized nations who believe they’ve rid themselves of bloodsport, but the attitude these days is one of reactionary pride. Of course, so this logic goes, bullfighting isn’t a product of “European civilization,” but its refusal to compromise with a polite pan-European ethic is exactly what gives it meaning. On the other hand, most folks outside Iberia misunderstand the appeal of the corrida. Within it is a secret history of Europe: its Mediterranean bull-cults, its religious theater-spectacle, and its militaristic displays with and against its southern neighbors. Nobody who respects the corrida calls it a sport; it is, as Hemingway once put it, “the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.”

Catalan Albert Serra has no interest in defending his passion for the corrida against the outsiders’ centuries-old accusations. Instead, his first nonfiction film, Afternoons of Solitude, documents this practice without commentary or context, so that, no matter their reading of the events themselves, the audience must admit that this is neither Bugs Bunny’s performance in Bully for Bugs (1953) nor an act of wanton bloodlust.

Serra’s film catalogs the rituals, dress, and performance of Peruvian matador Andrés Roca Rey as he, yes, dresses as a shiny man and kills bulls. These displays are as violent as protestors promise: over half the film’s running time features bleeding bulls that will die onscreen. But, in lieu of sport’s competitive need to cause as much violence as possible, the wounds inflicted here are highly ritualized. First, the picador on horseback goads the bull to attack his steed’s protective clothing, allowing him to lance the bull’s neck muscles, forcing it into a straight charge. Then, the banderilleros barb the bull with sticks to enrage him; his face-off with the matador will thus be predictable, uncoordinated, but fierce. Finally, the matador (literally Latin for “killer”) dances with the bull with the aid of his muleta, or cape, only to place himself in the center of the bull’s charging path to strike him with a fake sword. Almost as an afterthought, a real sword is used to pierce through the bull’s spine, killing it. In Afternoons of Solitude, there are no singular grand moments in the ring, no drunken cheers of victory or vulgar taunts that one finds in a football match. Even the momentary cheers of “olé!” after each withdrawal of the crimson muleta sound closest to the “amen” of religious affirmation. There are no points and no incentive to cause further violence than what the ritual demands. Any competition among matadors is akin to that of directors at a film festival where skill may matter, but beauty matters more.

Protestors against the corrida likely won’t find arguments for a meaningful, ritualized violence more appealing than those for bloodsport. Child sacrifice also has a rich, meaningful history. But, while I would love to affirm my fellow non-Iberians’ feelings about even beautiful violence having no place in our world, Rey’s performance in this death ritual is among the best acting committed to screen this decade. Out of the ring, Serra captures him in moments between anticipation and meditation: bright balls of sweat dot his face while his eyes venture into middle-distance. He silently dons his traja de luces (”suit of lights”) with a clear reverence for the dressing ritual that’s instantly undermined by his squire’s wrestling his taleguilla all the way up his body like a parent stretching a onesie over their baby. In the ring, he plays a kabuki imitation of a mad rooster, his chest lifted up and exerted out with his back bent as if modeling a concave lens. Before he delivers his final blow, he purses his lips into a silent and cartoonish mid-shout and fixes that stare from his habitual middle-distance to the small of a charging bull’s back. There’s a bizarre grace to his dance, pantomime, and occasional call-and-response that feels preternatural, sharing blood with Oedipus Rex or the rituals of the Eleusinian Mysteries. This is a nonfiction film, yes, but to quibble about his performance here would be pedantic and wrong — like any rockstar, Rey constantly plays the role expected of him.

That said, it’s also easy to forget that Afternoons of Solitude really is a nonfiction film. Serra-veteran cinematographer Artur Tort uses three camera operators to shoot full coverage of each corrida, but, where a typical crew might constantly shoot verité versions of master-, medium-, and reverse-shots, this production opts for cowboy shots and close-ups. The result is a jarringly clear portrait of Rey’s pliant face, which may suddenly cut to an impressionistic bolt of blood-red and bull-black. With Rey’s silent movie face-based storytelling and Serra’s editing, there’s no need for a master shot. In fact, there’s very little need to cut at all. Most shots only end when a subject has completely left the frame or when a sudden change of perspective might emphasize moment; and, even then, Serra will deliberately hold for two beats longer than expected just to create further tension. Similarly, Ferran Font and Marc Verdaguer’s ominous score creeps in to serve as counterpoint for the few moments of relaxation and a harmony for Rey’s measured anticipation; in the ring, no music plays, but occasionally some isolated commentary referencing his cajones comes through.

The movie is simply this: Rey dresses, he convenes with his fellow toreros in his limo, he waits to fight the bull, he fights the bull. Then, it repeats. Serra strips bullfighting down to its aesthetic and ritualistic components — a fan’s excited knock on the limo is the only indication of an outside world — but doesn’t shy away from what’s obviously made it one of the most controversial European events. This allows us to ask a more interesting question than the one that led this piece: what is bullfighting? The famous female matadora Conchita Cintrón likened it to a morality play, stating that “within its small circle one finds life, death, ambition, despair, success, failure, faith, desperation, valor, cowardliness, generosity, and meanness — all condensed into the actions of a single afternoon or even a single moment.” In the film’s bloodiest moments, it reminds of the work of Actionist artist Hermann Nitsch, who staged recreations of Catholic processions by replacing the relics and sacraments with desiccated animal parts and blood. If bullfighting is an art, it’s one that’s inseparable from its religious roots, where sacrifice and death accompanied public spectacles in an ancient Theatre of Cruelty. Afternoons of Solitude asks us to reconnect with that uncomfortable history, one that perhaps all art shares. — ZACH LEWIS

exergue – on documenta 14

“Our dominance is supreme and our isolation is profound.” These words, taken from N. Scott Momaday’s essay, “A Storyteller and His Art,” pronounce the condition of modern man, some four hours into the sprawling 14-hour institutional excavation that comprises Dimitris Athiridis’ exergue – on documenta 14. One might be tempted to read into the aphorism something more fundamental and innate to the human condition and its necessary pursuit of aesthetic ideals, just as one might seek to isolate from its supremacy and profundity the question of technology and its totalizing influences. For the steadfast curatorial team behind the 14th edition of the documenta exhibition, neither approach quite hits the mark, as the conspiring forces around them seek, whether wilfully or obtusely, to disentangle the exhibition from its purported aim of balancing “between the love for art and the engagement for society.” When neither aesthete nor activist are convinced of its utility, where does the money flow from?

This conundrum lends exergue’s proceedings an air of frustration, even as the film’s fly-on-the-wall approach and virtually unobstructed access into the machinations of documenta 14’s realization provide an enthralling and even overwhelming experience for the art economy’s outsiders. Training his camera on its artistic director, Adam Szymczyk, Athiridis embarks upon a two-year odyssey tracing the curatorial and financing processes of the exhibition, from its rocky inception in 2015 as a proposal for two host cities — the first and thus far only attempt in its 70-year history — to the multiple crises of coordination and budget deficits that threatened to derail its opening in 2017. As the film’s main subject apart from the documenta itself, Szymczyk exudes little of the self-importance associated with the tastemakers of culture: having previously served as chief curator of the Kunsthalle Basel, the lithe and mostly soft-spoken Pole appears almost obstinate in his sincere ambitions to anchor at the documenta a site of transformative potential. “Things need to be radically redefined,” goes the prevailing sentiment shared among his team.

Among the myriad difficulties they encounter along the way, some of them Herculean, is the issue of what it means exactly to be radical, or if the documenta’s institutional framework can indeed serve such a function. The documenta’s origins, as an instrument of soft power wielded against the Cold War’s losers, closely mirror the German state’s present economic interests; funding and exhibiting artists from the global South therefore becomes a matter of political expediency, while the suggestion to expand documenta beyond its home city of Kassel to Athens — now a metonym for Germany’s predatory regime of fiscal austerity over the Greeks during the Eurozone crisis — is inevitably met with outcry and smear campaigns. Yet the sheer openness envisioned by Szymczyk’s collaborators, whose ranks include the likes of Dieter Roelstraete and Paul B. Preciado, also invites charges of bourgeois gentrification. Insofar as its critiques of contemporary capitalism go unnoticed except by the few privileged enough to attend, the documenta’s global ambit appears with each passing day to fade into sharp irrelevance.

By virtue of its sheer duration, exergue (the second longest non-experimental documentary so far, just after Peter Watkins’ Resan) devotes little time to moral pontification, allowing the multiplicity of exchanges to speak for themselves. Internal curatorial meetings, negotiations with sponsors and participating museums, scouting trips to Beirut, Johannesburg, Kolkata: laying bare the grueling realities of an art world in perpetual decline, Athiridis also places this world in conversation with the more pressing incursions of political disarray, with neofascism and neoliberalism being the two most vehement currents against freedom and expression. While more apparently successful in resisting the former, Szymczyk and co. are quick to remind us of their intertwined conditions, that “fear is the common currency of neoliberalism, precisely because it can [more easily capitalize on] desire and unbound joy.” No easy answer inheres — a fact true of art, but now equally illustrative of art’s wider place in its ecosystem of curators, financiers, producers, and spectators. exergue, whose title denotes a space or inscription on a coin that inscribes a symbolic value beyond its practical worth, may ultimately be both futile in stemming the depreciation of hope and necessary as a document of hope’s tenuous possibility. — MORRIS YANG

Suburban Fury

“There comes a time when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun.” When Sara Jane Moore attempted and failed to kill President Gerald Ford on September 22, 1975, she did so to express a deep disaffection with the United States. Years of proximity to radical leftist political activism had revealed to her that the America she’d experienced as a white Southern woman was not the America that everybody experienced, particularly the marginalized. All signs — from an unelected president and vice-president running the show to a rapacious, underhanded foreign policy approach wreaking havoc abroad — pointed to a country that had lost its way; or more precisely, had its way hijacked by a cabal of power brokers uninterested in ever relinquishing the reins. To illustrate the absurdity of an empire peacocking as a benevolent beacon of democracy, of ordering assassinations and coups yet denigrating similar violence being done against it, Moore woke up one morning, got herself a gun, and prepared to make a statement in the starkest terms she knew how.

This, however, is merely a theory about her motive. Because the fascinating and frustrating thing about Robinson Devor’s ambitious documentary Suburban Fury is that, for a film so intimately tied to the perspective of one person, Sara Jane Moore remains remarkably hard to pin down. The title could even be argued to be a misnomer. It implies an expression of rage arising from a festering discontent amplified by suburbia’s suffocating domestic trappings, yet the film operates with a scope that reveals a more multifaceted angle of exploration. Through one woman, Devor and crew strive to tell the story of the 1970s — a decade historians have been increasingly referring to as a “pivot of change” — arguing that the person is indeed political.

The first line of text lays out that Moore will be the only person interviewed. Quotations that will be attributed to other people are drawn entirely from her own recollection. She’s a well-chosen subject for such a solipsistic setup. Frank, funny, and occasionally brash, Moore headlines her own one-woman show, a dream come true for someone whose photos from their time at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio suggest a desire for stardom. Her ability to perform is what made her such an effective FBI informant, passing along information on various political organizations. Her ability to perform also makes her tough to parse. When toward the film’s start she talks about people’s varying presentations of self, you begin to question how real Moore is being in these interviews. She doesn’t come off as a pathological liar, but rather deeply image-conscious, someone who knows how to spin the truth, who knows when to leave a thread hanging with an allusion. Couple this with the firm boundaries she sets regarding what she will and won’t discuss, and you’re left with this entertaining, inscrutable lady whose moral ambiguity the filmmakers play up by infusing Suburban Fury with a bit of a noirish and true-crime vibe. Given the time we spend with Moore, it never feels like we too often get a true peak behind the curtain. The lack of fuller insight into what makes her tick lessens her strength as the film’s linchpin. Over time, her imposed limitations make it clear the story will have to settle for a degree of superficiality, and the spell she casts does weaken accordingly.

Moore is our imperfect gateway into politically tumultuous times. The Attica Prison Rebellion, antiwar protests, abortion rights fights, armed Indigenous rights activists, militant labor organizers, the Black Panthers: Suburban Fury steadily builds a collage depicting an America engaged in an ideological civil war. The soul of the country, what it stands for and who it fully includes, is what’s at stake. We see that those in charge and those in the state working on their masters’ behalf will go to great lengths to quench any revolutionary fires. The point the film is making isn’t new, but it is provocatively communicated thanks to the film’s greatest strength — its bevy of archival material. The filmmakers flesh out a gripping sense of time and place with as much media as they can get their hands on, from headlines to news broadcasts to security footage. The sum of these parts is a sociopolitical landscape that feels inherently nefarious. Instead of complete access to Moore’s rationale for her infamous actions, we’re left with a strong intuition about her reasoning through seeing an America deserving retribution. While never striking bedrock tonally or thematically, Suburban Fury still has the scattershot breadth and genre intrigue to give it some sticking power after the credits roll. — TRAVIS DESHONG

Currents Program 4: Space Is the Place

Revolving Rounds

In Johann Lurf’s thrilling 2019 film Cavalcade, a 35mm camera records an apparent long take of a six-foot phenakistoscope water wheel constructed by Lurf. Lit by a strobe light, the device spins, kicks up water, and induces a trancelike frenzy of animation, as the camera’s 35mm film and the lighting momentarily arrest the forms on the wheel at different split-seconds, with our perception keeping up at whatever rate it is able. In Revolving Rounds, Lurf returns to this sort of cinematic illusion, this time in collaboration with artist/architect/researcher Christina Jauernik.

Here, we begin on the land outside a greenhouse, tracking sideways in 3D. Attention is immediately drawn to the 3D camera setup, as the composition in depth is paramount — a lens flare angles toward the camera from the 45-degree sun, and plants cross the frame in a parallax relationship with the greenhouse in the background, which is more so the shot’s implied focus. As the cameras track, there is delicate, elliptical montage, with each cut seeming to push toward a little bit later in the day, until we are inside the greenhouse and it is night. While the tracking in 3D arguably privileges space, this montage draws our attention to time, disrupting the floating camera from becoming too hypnotic. This spacetime rhythm is complicated at a certain point in the greenhouse. 

The camera eventually arrives at a sort of tableau setup of a 16mm projector firing its image into a cyclostereoscope, another spinning, paracinematic device, this one invented in France with the purpose of allowing for collective viewership of 3D imagery without any other optical mediation necessary. All kinds of contradictory associations arise. We’re viewing this device made for a group through a single viewpoint, except that single view is actually two cameras, aligned and synced for 3D. The image projected onto the cyclostereoscope is a 16mm one, presumably filmed non-stereo, but the device introduces a 3D illusion into the footage, activating a certain depth in it that was only implied by our understanding of space before. Soon, the camera supposedly (“supposedly,” because there is an animator credited) gets very, very close to the projector’s film-strip, to the point where we are only seeing abstracted grain, as if under a very powerful loupe, shuffled along through the projector’s gate, with a slow-motion flash of the projector beam, followed by relative darkness and movement of the film strip to the next frame, etc. 

Perhaps the most startling point in the film comes in these moments of darkness. We are taught that in the screening situation, there is a split-second of black between each visible film frame, but here the film-strip and its grain is very slightly visible even in the darkness, making literal the idea that the empty space of montage, even between frames, is not actually so empty — that the imaginative leaps that we make between frames, between shots, actually have something material about them.

ESP

Citing in the credits a malfunctioning inkjet printer as a co-creator, Laura Kraning’s ESP is a frenetic and abrasive experimental animation, with photographs of Albany’s Empire State Plaza architecture printed and montaged in back-and-forth flickering stanzas that somewhat recall some of Ken Jacobs’s NYC eternalisms, albeit playing with geometrically conflicting compositions rather than image inversion, and of course not lasting for eternities. It also echoes in a way Kraning’s own Irradiant Field, a much slower documentation of architecture — solar panels laid out horizontally in a desert landscape, whereas here we see lines of building exteriors spanning vertical space. But where that film takes its time to document how the panels shift over the course of a day to track the sun, in this one, the chaotic flickering plays out like cascading thaumatrope animations, with the two frames of each sequence sort of encroaching on one another, creating a collision, a third geometry made up of different views of a given building, or buildings. The faulty printer seems to leak color, or print noisy color fields when it should be printing black, sometimes banding multiple different colors across the whole image, making for a kind of chromatic superstrate, a cloudy, soft-metallic rainbow that adds a further abstract dimension to the angular architectural patterns. The sound is similarly turbulent, with the inkjet patterns of color and light information being interpreted sonically, similar to how a film projector’s optical sound reader might interpret chaotic patterns in a direct animation film. As the images go by, their sound comes out as a wild, percussive thrum, which in turn evokes the mechanics of the printing process. This all makes for quite a tactile experience, a quietly psychedelic mix of texture, color, and sound.

re-engraved

Lei Lei’s re-engraved tells the story of the one-time last wood engraving artist in Yangzhou, creating a dialog between the historical and cultural trajectory of her materials and that of analog film. As the film progresses, we get more context about her career as an engraver, passed down from her father, and how she nearly gave up the practice, which may have resulted in the extinction of an artform were it not for it finally becoming declared culturally significant and worthy of preservation. By the end of the film, we learn that she now has numerous apprentices — technically they apprentice for her father, but really she teaches them. This is all told in a sort of orbital, essayistic fashion that you often find in experimental documentary. As the engraver narrates, Lei Lei presents a panoply of analog film imagery, often using handmade film techniques such as hole punching, drawing on film, and more. For the drawing portions, we see the process behind the art: first, a sort of macro view of the film strip being drawn on as a whole fragment of an object, and then presented after scanning, with the drawing appearing frame by frame. 

The most curious treatment of film here gets perhaps the most screentime — 35mm film shot with what seems like a Lomokino camera, the same kind Apichatpong Weerasethakul used in his experimental film Ashes. The rarely used camera itself is something of a contradiction in terms, a modern invention that’s really kind of a re-invention, a hand-cranked mechanism, but one that shoots differently than those from early cinema. Here, 35mm photo film runs through vertically, as it would in a typical motion picture camera, but with only a fraction of what would normally make up a frame being exposed. This makes for images with a narrower-than-cinemascope aspect ratio,  and these images are only shot as fast as the operator winds the camera, to a point. Lei Lei plays with this format quite a bit, progressing the frames forward in time at different frame rates, sometimes orienting them vertically, dissolving and overlaying them. A dying medium finds a moment of rejuvenation, as with the “culturally significant” shot in the arm for woodcut engraving. The soundtrack underlying the engraver’s voiceover is essentially an electroacoustic composition, with percussive elements that sound like they’re made with everyday objects, guitar sounds, soft hums of a synthesizer, and what sounds like possibly a device that records electronic field. A collection of both abstract and concrete sounds which lay the foundation for the film’s investigations into these two forms, which also exist at this dialectic — eminently material gestures that evoke something else in the imagination.

A Black Screen Too

After the success of her 2021 experimental narrative Ste. Anne, here Rhayne Vermette revisits the handmade mode of some of her earlier experimental films, such as Scene Missing, from 2015. In A Black Screen Too, after some DIY leader material, we begin with a black 16mm film frame, into which a white animated scratch in the emulsion slowly creeps in from the top, the kind Len Lye pioneered in Free Radicals. With this line, we also hear its representation on the soundtrack, as with ESP earlier, this time as a soft, fabricky patter. More lines join the single one, eventually forming a grid, whose horizontal lines moving across the sound reader is heard as a pulsewave low-frequency oscillation, almost a bassy tone. At this point, the black image itself breaks down, gets physically sliced up and collaged in time as little black rectangles on clear film leader. It seems the grid that materialized before was something of a blueprint for this slicing. Color frames then replace the black frames in a torrential cascade of pigments, which have a backlit warmth about them, full of texture — dirt, splicing tape, scratches, and smudges. It’s a prismatic whirlwind, which culminates in a return to the black frame, and a quieting of the chaotic optical soundtrack — a wonderful 90 seconds spent with film as a material.

The Land at Night

Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie’s The Land at Night establishes its language early on, as we see flickering, flashing images, a few frames at a time, of the ocean tide washing ashore, lit intermittently by a flashlight, the flicker apparently created in-camera. The soundtrack here reinforces the imagery, with a melody playing over field recordings of the ocean, providing something of a base for the fragmented images to ride along. Through these modes of shooting and sound collage, Barrie and Tuohy take us to a number of different locations, rhythmically illuminating landscapes of quite a lot of variance, from the sea to the woods to abandoned homesteads, and more. Often, the imagery is complicated further with double or multiple exposures, themselves sometimes flickering, sometimes carrying through in longer takes, which provide sort of a new ground for the first exposure’s flicker, as opposed to black. This creates a weaving polyrhythm, almost cubistic, occasionally with multiple angles of similar scenes flashing in and out. At first, much of the imagery is, if not black-and-white, monochromatic, due to these neutral locations being lit by a white flashlight. But as we move to the forest, the houses, the cars, Tuohy and Barrie bring in some incredibly vivid color, as with a purple sunset sky flanking the trees, at one point. 

While the soundtrack, as mentioned, often guides us along with sounds we might hear in these spaces, such as creaking floorboards and doors in what seems like an abandoned home, a couple of times it introduces a complication. In one scene, the filmmakers explore a vehicular graveyard, with colorful, rusty cars abandoned in a field. Here, we hear horns honking, and sounds of radio, which does more than echo what’s on screen — it echoes back to a time when these cars were still functioning. Later, as the film starts to wrap up, a human hand enters the frame, produces a lighter, and blasts the contents of an aerosol can through its flame, creating a flamethrower. It feels a little bit foreboding, as it maybe evokes human responsibility for some of the sparseness of the rest of the film’s locations, but it’s also a dynamic burst of energy, and kind of a funny one. And here, the soundtrack points to the future — what sounds like emergency radio communication, maybe firefighters coordinating to put out a fire presumably caused by these hands. The hands and the flames multiply across the screen, in a kaleidoscopic crescendo.

Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya

In the closing film of NYFF’s Currents Program 4, Malena Szlam takes us to the Gondwana Rainforest of Australia, creating double and triple exposures of mountains, volcanic rock, verdant canopies, and golden sunsets. A lot is going on in these stacked compositions. At the most basic level, new geometries and geologies are formed, with the land and the skies in each shot combining in new ways, hills displaced onto silhouetted horizons, trees into cloudy skies. Sometimes this operates at a scalar level, with long shots of distant mountains existing in the same frame as extreme closeups, often seemingly shot at the base of those same mountains, making for a startling contrast, general shape and specific material visible at once. Szlam shows incredible control of exposure between shots, often manipulating one shot’s brightness in such a way that it progressively reveals or conceals details of the other. So, if a sky in one shot begins well — or underexposed, allowing for another shot’s superimposition to be visible there, by the end, Szlam might open up the aperture or variable shutter, blowing it out, which puts “too much” light information on the film strip, washing away both the color of the sky and the double exposure, at least in that section of the frame. There are also contrasting modes of time operating from exposure to exposure — any given stack might have one shot filmed at 24fps while another runs in timelapse. The timelapses in themselves also have particular rhythms, often depicting the sun or clouds moving in the sky, sometimes seeming to slow down or speed up just for a moment before resuming its prior speed. All of this throws the viewer into an estranged sort of timezone, one where attention is somehow simultaneously heightened, able to see detail in a different way, but also dulled into a certain sense of reverie. There’s a simple poetry in seeing the sun move faster than it should.

Further enriching the whole affair is the soundtrack, composed by prolific ambient musician and owner of the Room40 record label, Lawrence English. Densely layered field recordings are gradually layered and mixed in and out, with birdsong and monkey calls delicately overlapping with cavernous washes of rumbling noise, which sound like they are manipulated with filters and EQ, modulating how ‘in focus’ the textures are at any given time. There also seems to be a delay effect on some of the noise, creating a rhythmic resonance with the birdsong, which of course loops and repeats organically. Some of these techniques, in concert with Szlam’s images, get somewhere near realizing the sonic dream of Jean Epstein — being able to “zoom in” to a sound, to inhabit and navigate within its texture. Here, the sounds of these landscapes are explored on what feels like microscopic levels, which dovetail with Szlam’s images, especially those of grainy, iridescent minerals, whose shimmer recalls earlier shots of stars, only just visible, crawling across the sky in timelapse, the celestial and the rocky material in concert.

One of the film’s most beguiling sequences is perhaps the ending one — Szlam brings her camera inside the rainforest itself, exploring its vivid green surfaces with a similar multiple exposure strategy as what’s preceded. But here, a shot of a softly rippling stream is superimposed continually over a number of other shots, in double and triple exposure, evoking in a way the classical Hollywood transition effect that might take us from a diegetic world to a dream and back. While the ripples here don’t introduce an optical distortion in the same way a Hollywood optical printer with a filter between the lens and the projected film might, they do occasionally give that illusion, as some of the blurred green reflections in the water almost seem like displacements of the arboreal greens in adjacent shots. This sequence leaves us in yet another unmoored kind of time, in this instance on a more structural, macro level. And since the ripples only occur once, not bookending any discrete sequence, we’re left in this paradox, in the middle of waking and dreaming, senses again sharpened and softened at once. — ALEX BROADWELL