The best of the experimental film programming at the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look 2025 is actually found outside the program specifically dedicated to experimental short films. Zhou Tao’s The Periphery of the Base and Ewelina Rosinska’s Unstable Rocks are major works with their own inventive rhythms: the former sets you afloat in a trance, while the latter keeps you grounded via a construction of mathematical rhythms and droll visuals. They’d also be ill-suited to being paired with the 10 films in the program entitled Illuminations, a group that is entirely shot on 16mm or Super-8 and is aiming for smaller discoveries and more intimate pleasures. It’s also a group with too many titles proving you can work outside the mainstream and still be conventional.
The experimental film “tradition of quality” tends to involve shooting and editing on celluloid, presumably to ensure a certain visual baseline. This tends to be combined with pastiche on the subject matters of filmmakers who mastered analog and never deviated from using it: Robert Beavers and his hands working at art, Nathaniel Dorsky and his plants, and the admittedly unavoidable blurry visions of Stan Brakhage. On paper, the commitment to a harder job is certainly a more commendable approach than some of the lurching attempts at digital (or, unfortunately, A.I.) that have made their way into certain festivals. It’s still frequently hard to get excited about watered-down derivatives, it raises potentially unflattering questions about money and reactionary aestheticism, and it ultimately looks even more like a safe tack in the wake of recent New York City retrospectives for Beavers and Dorsky. Whether projecting the actual prints justifies the inclusion for experiential purposes is left as an exercise for the reader who goes to see them.
Blanca Garcia’s How to Make Magic could have been entitled How to Make an Experimental Film. It’s all in-camera edits and plant footage, and the effect is that of a daily walk: it probably won’t hurt you, but you probably won’t remember most of it. No digital equivalent would be taken as seriously. Maximilien Luc Proctor’s Aotearoa is similarly a little too content to be a succession of pretty pictures for its first half, but its subsequent use of superimpositions during a trip to the beach does manage to evoke the way both people and impressions in sand will disappear. Kevin Jerome Everson is usually a sure bet for coming up with an interesting new way to look at African Americans going about their daily lives, but Chelsea Drive is a rare minor entry that’s mostly just content to watch students lounge on campus and dance at a house party for a few minutes. And elsewhere, though it’s ultimately a bit of a technical exercise, Helena Wittmann’s continued commitment to incorporating narrative into her experiments in A Thousand Waves Away does make the shift from a solemn ritual to an odd light show register more than most of its company, and it has an enticing score from Nika Son.
Miniature essay films are another major trend in experimental filmmaking right now, and the practitioners are sometimes as interconnected as the subject matters. Ben Balcom’s The Phalanx attempts to use writing from a 19th-century agrarian commune as a voiceover to link images shot at its former site and various archival materials related to its construction, but the images are more accompaniment to the audio than striking in their own right, and the film becomes a piece of music with visual accompaniment as a result. One of his performers, Sam Drake, actually has her own film in the lineup, entitled Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air, and Balcom is credited with providing additional cinematography. (The Phalanx closes with shaky cam applied to neon, Suspicions opens with it; did the lineup functionally feature two films by the same director?) It’s another essay film that feels largely audio-first, this time about the United States Cold War radiation tests on citizens. It’s a bit more accessible than The Phalanx, but that makes it clearer that this subject demanded more passionate fire than smoky wisps of cinematic incense.
Sarah Ballard’s Full Out is another essay film that feels too built around its soundtrack (a text describing 19th-century female hospital patients being hypnotized into hysteria as a sort of performance), but despite stretches of imagery that simply aren’t very interesting, it does somewhat reward the viewer’s patience via its finale of cheerleaders turned into a tangle of flapping limbs. Eva Giolo’s Memory is an Animal, It Barks With Many Mouths is more successful at paying tribute to the lives, fables, and language (Ladin) of the people who live in the Dolomites. It’s unusual for being a highly regimented film that isn’t quite structuralist: whenever you hear certain sounds, there will always be a certain type of image associated with that sound. The parts never quite converging and remaining variations on a theme is consistently interesting, even if the film doesn’t seem to ever quite develop beyond being a general tribute to the region as a result.
The two real successes of the lineup, fittingly enough, are proof that even the familiar templates of celluloid poem-portraits, or essay films built around sound cues, really can strike at something fresh and new. Luke Fowler’s essay film Being Blue generally keeps its focus on the subject of Derek Jarman, although it poignantly borrows its title and a brief snatch of voiceover from William Gass’ On Being Blue — perhaps a droll joke on the impossibility of Fowler being Jarman. Much like Fowler’s great film Cezanne (2019), the primary subject is about how the world of a great artist doesn’t look the same after he’s left it. As we hear a Jarman-esque soundscape about the man himself that potentially conjures up memories of Jarman’s own audioscape for his final masterwork Blue, we explore the Prospect Cottage where he lived his life, thought about and worked on his art, and tended his beloved gardens. Some portions have been carefully preserved down to the smallest details, but the vistas he once glanced upon aren’t quite the same. It’s an homage with some real thought behind its construction.
Still, the best film in the bunch is also the program’s opener: James Edmonds’ Songs Overheard in the Shadows. A filmmaker whose ability to find recurring visual patterns has resulted in films that flow as effortlessly as the memories he shoots, it also results in works that don’t lend themselves nicely to written summaries. Edmonds summarizes the film with “recurring details point towards a centre,” which is precisely what helps keep its collection of microgestures sufficiently varied without being incoherent. The film’s saturated colors that frequently appear as pure bursts of light leaks are plenty enticing on their own, but the recurring images of people (usually Edmonds’ partner Petra Graf) standing in front of tunnels and windows that look like they’ll swallow them up in light or shadow practically suction the viewer in. Most of the images in Songs flash by quickly enough so that they don’t become too familiar, but it seems to be a film oriented around similar themes to Edmonds’ most famous work to date, A Return (2018), which was about finding a way to make the commonalities and differences between separate locations into something harder to parse. It’s the most mysterious film in the lineup, but that might just be what makes it the most illuminating.
Published as part of First Look 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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