Whatever else one can say about the merits of experimental film, “it looks expensive” is typically not one of the usual citations. Malena Szlam’s Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya is the rare 16mm film that could pass for 70mm. The formerly volcanic Bunya Mountains of Australia undoubtedly have plenty of natural beauty, but Szlam thankfully avoids conventional prettiness here. The film that results could easily pass for a montage in an epic narrative film with money to burn, but there’s no risk of something banally human interfering with its lustre and grandiosity. One of the few narrative projects to similarly transfigure the colors of the wilderness into something that could only exist in cinema has a title that Szlam easily could have borrowed: Glauber Rocha’s The Age of the Earth. Despite her utilization of in-camera superimpositions and editing, the construction is carefully guided and is no mere collection of ordinary nature footage; the camera’s focus circle must have been like a laser pointer. Sometimes the mountains take up different parts of the frame in a way that implies tectonic shifts. At other times, the local fauna is given the same enormous proportions as the skyline to create an image that resembles one’s dreams of the out-of-control wilderness of the dinosaur age. It collapses the locations into something that resembles no place on earth. The sound design is a series of field recordings by Laurence English, which tend to feature an overwhelming roar: the sound of volcanoes, earthquakes, and continental drift. It’s heightened, but it’s an appropriate match for Szlam’s ultimate coup de grace in the form of her color scheme. The sky’s volcanic ash refracts sunlight into incredible levels of color saturation, turning the sky into something inherently prismatic and resulting in effects resembling paintings by both Rothko and Klimt. Even the clouds look like watercolors, and their motions resemble a steaming volcano that glows in pastels rather than reds. The title may conjure up images of an ashy necropolis, but Szlam’s film is as alive as it gets.
Published as part of Cinéma du Réel 2025.
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