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.
Published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 4.
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