Little Boy

In a less-than-apocryphal anecdote repeated throughout the French media, Jean Renoir once said, “I made La Bête humaine because [Jean] Gabin and I wanted to play with trains.” Trains are a holy symbol for early cinephiles, not just because of the connection to cinema’s first notable hit, L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat by the brothers Lumière, but because of the rush from similarly early films that placed the camera just above the coupler of the front locomotive during its journey — films that promised the exciting potential of the new art form. In the United States in particular, the train system promised a finally unified nation after the Civil War, as not only would North and South work on reuniting, but, for the first time, East and West were traversable, communicable, and ultimately controllable by the federal government. For James Benning, too, trains stand in for both America and cinema itself. Much of his work features the variegated landscapes of a diverse nation, as well as the sounds and songs of its history. But the iron horse is his most common symbol (especially in his initialized titles, RR and BNSF), that mechanical beast that stands in not just for a united, shared American history, but the technological progress that has determined America’s place in the 20th century. In a way, Benning, like Renoir, has always wanted to play with trains, and his latest work, little boy, may be his most literal expression of that.

That’s because Benning has switched from showing the landscapes and industrial structures that lay between America’s cities to their mid-century representation in railroad models. The film is structured by segments of disembodied hands painting the first few pieces of a model building, still attached to the plastic wiring (called a “runner”) of its kit, as a pop or folk song with varying degrees of political undertones accompanies the amateur hobbyists’ strokes and daubs. Then, a still image presents the completed model while a truncated version of a famous political speech hits its most familiar notes. Though many of these completed models are anonymous industrial buildings, many are also decorated with explicitly political signs such as “Northrop Grumman,” or “Raytheon,” or even some small Keith Haring-inspired tags. These sequences appear in chronological order of their respective speeches, ranging from Eisenhower’s warning of the military-industrial complex to Cesar Chavez’s speech on unionizing California farm workers to Hillary Clinton’s bragging about the Obama administration’s military policy in the Middle East. The model presented just before a nuclear bomb is a train car.

After keeping up with James Benning’s last decade’s worth of work, I always find myself paying attention to details that likely have very little significance on the structure or content of the film itself. For little boy, after noticing the setup and preparing myself for the pattern of images, my mind wandered to questions such as “Are these the same hands building each of these models? Do they normally build these models, or did Benning just grab them for these scenes? Did he hire them based on their hands alone? Is there a racial element at play with these hands appearing before Stokely Carmichael’s words?” — questions admittedly answered by the end credits. There’s a scene in the novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when the narrator notices that students in a writing class are suddenly inspired to write more when presented with a much simpler prompt, like writing about a quarter. Similarly, Benning’s work presents an opportunity for a stream-of-consciousness game of I-Spy to suddenly override the usual critical faculties of the viewer — a different mode of “paying attention” than trying to think deeply about the much more intentional juxtapositions of song, model, and speech.

The other sort of game — trying to find bits of playful meaning in these juxtapositions — becomes a bit less fulfilling than previous Benning features. After all, these are some of the biggest, most important political speeches that either have been used as a cudgel against their speaker’s imperialism (such as Reagan’s admittance of the Iran-Contra scandal here) or are familiar mobilizing messages from the anti-war left (such as Dr. Helen Caldicott’s chastisement of American foreign policy at the end). Though little boy could thus play as a greatest hits collection (of both songs and speeches that congratulate the ideals of the contemporary American left), the accompanying toy imagery never serves to complicate or energize these speeches’ political power. Benning’s program notes suggest that the viewer engages with the film as if they were a little boy listening to American history as they build it in miniature, but these words belong to too meaningful a history to which one can easily listen with a newfound sense of naivety. Meanwhile, our political present has advanced well beyond the speed of mere train tracks, which makes George Wallace and Harry Truman’s speeches here, no matter how relevant they remain, seem like the remnants of a medieval codex rather than radio transmissions from a mere century ago. That said, there’s still a frightful beauty in the final image of the model nuke, likely “Little Boy,” as if all of history is just a plaything made to music. — ZACH LEWIS

Evidence

In Lee Anne Schmitt’s latest feature, Evidence, which premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year, the conspiracy theory adopts a progressive slant. With Schmitt’s characteristic attention to the thematic weight of the materiality of film and objects, her cinematic essay implicates the viewer (and the filmmaker) in a wide shot of political and environmental history.

Schmitt’s father travelled the world as a part of the international division of Olin Industries, a chemicals and munitions manufacturer. And while her childhood is defined, in part, by the beautiful dolls he bought for her during his travels, which she captures in velvety, intimate 16mm film, her attention is aimed more directly at the company’s transgressions. Thus, the first half of the film charts the company’s dealings with the environment. Toxic waste dumping from its manufacturing plants has transformed their surrounding areas into Superfund sites by the EPA, which pose long-term threats to human health and require extensive clean-up efforts.

Schmitt includes snippets of footage from outside various Olin Industries plants around the country, also shot in 16mm film, which casts a noticeably nostalgic glow over what is quite grim material. But that’s not without purpose. Through her visuals, she deftly weaves together warm childhood memories and the damage caused by Olin Industries, and reveals the complicated complicity all of us bear in the Earth’s pain.

Schmitt takes implication even further when she turns her attention to the Olin Foundation, a conservative, grant-making arm of Olin Industries established by the founder’s son, John M. Olin, in 1958. From then until 1966, it primarily acted as a money launderer for the CIA, which was funding anti-communist propaganda; but its largely inactive fund was revitalized in 1969 when Olin, disturbed by the student uprisings at his alma mater (Cornell University), decided to pour the foundation’s money into the nascent Law and Economics Movement.

The foundation, and soon others like it, spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars funding new think tanks, university departments, and individual scholars with the goal of establishing a dominant conservative movement in the United States. The Olin Foundation’s name is behind the rise of a diversity of prominent conservative figures, from Phyllis Schlafly to Dinesh D’Souza. It was also key in establishing the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that advocates for an originalist interpretation of the constitution by its members, and which includes at least five current Supreme Court Justices; at one point, Schmitt gravely describes the Federalist Society and its far-reaching aims as a “slow-motion judicial coup.” One struggles to find a better description.

Evidence lives up to its name, charting with clinical efficiency the insidious tendrils that the Olin Foundation, and other industrial family-led trusts like it, cultivated in order to wrangle the United States’ legal systems, popular media, and cultural norms under its control. Schmitt’s logic is, like all conspiratorial thinking, lively and open. The viewer begins to internalize the slow dread the filmmaker describes in this history every time she films herself tracing a finger through the acknowledgment section of yet another foundational mainstream right-wing text (Charles Murray, John You, or Francis Fukuyama, to name a few) and inevitably lands on the Olin Foundation.

Evidence shifts gears in its second half, when Schmitt’s presence is more embodied and she speaks specifically about her family, and her reluctant, unexpected journey to becoming a mother. She acknowledges her uneasiness with the institution of the family, calling it the reactionary right’s main bludgeoning tool. Lauded as a place of security, it is also often people’s main source of violence, a reality Schmitt ties to more Olin Foundation-funded writing by James Dobson, who advocated corporal punishment for children as young as 15 months.

The Olin Foundation folded in 2005, though not before establishing the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), a think tank whose free market approach to environmentalism viewed the Earth as a thing to be used, not a place to live. Schmitt points to the role of humility in her own life, which she applies to her parenting, and her views on the environment, the latter shaped by the writing of Jedediah Purdy and his book After Nature, which argued, among other things, that the idea that humans are apart from Earth obscures the fact that they are dependent on it.

In Evidence’s final reflective sequences, the 16mm footage that once soberly accompanied an index of industrial harm now speaks for itself in lovely hues of green and blue, taking the form of mirrored lakes, rustling leaves, and blinking sunlight. Purdy’s humility takes hold of Schmitt’s camera, which seems to express the same love for and devotion to the Earth as her narration. Humility strikes Olin Industries, too, which continues, after many years, to pay for the cleanup of toxic chemical waste around its plants, the affected nearby water sources still hazardous as much as 50 years after contamination. Whether that humility will take, as it did with Schmitt, is probably unlikely; it’s too much to expect a billion-dollar corporation or, perhaps especially, the people running it to quell the quest for mastery of the Earth. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Paul

Quebecois director Denis Côté is something of a cinematic explorer. Over the course of his 25-year career, he has established himself as one of Canada’s premier filmmakers despite not having a breakout arthouse hit. This may be because, for the most part, Côté has resisted falling into a signature style, preferring to treat each project as an opportunity to develop new cinematic approaches. He works in both feature-length and short form, fiction as well as documentary, and veers between multi-actor productions and single-character portraiture. Much like his international colleagues Nicolas Peréda and João Pedro Rodrigues, Côté is restless, going all in on a particular genre or approach and then, with the next film, doing something completely different. While other brand-name auteurs are much more easily pegged — all the better for festival berths and niche marketing — Côté has a divergent approach that one expects will be all the more impressive with historical hindsight.

If there is one fairly consistent aspect to Côté’s work, it is probably his fascination with socially marginal figures. In films like Carcasses (2009), Wilcox (2019), and Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013), the director has asked his viewers to focus our attention on people who live well outside the mainstream, both geographically and psychologically. His latest film, Paul, is a bit different in that its subject lives his life in the heart of Montreal but, with the help of the Internet, exists on the outskirts of broader society. As we learn early on, Paul has struggled for years with his weight and his personal appearance, as well as crippling depression. However, he finds his own salvation through semi-sexual servitude. Calling himself the Cleaning Simp, Paul volunteers himself for housework, cleaning the homes of various women who dominate him in a variety of different ways: bondage, spanking, service as a human ottoman, etc. But the heart of Paul’s personal improvement project is housework, washing windows and floors, scrubbing toilets and sinks, and other so-called menial tasks. As Paul says, he takes great pleasure in seeing dirty things and putting forth the effort to make them clean.

Paul alternates between observational documentary and media critique, since throughout the film Côté shows us the YouTube videos Paul makes for his Cleaning Simp channel. They are chipper and motivational, with Paul inviting his many followers to accompany him on his journey of greater fitness and personal growth. One of the key subtexts in Paul is the comparison of the like-and-subscribe tone of Paul’s social media presence with the slower, more arduous experiences he has with his different dommes. One of them rides him like a horse; another walks on his back in boots; still another straps him to a chair as she goes about her business, rehearsing with her bandmates. This last example is notable because we watch Paul gradually become uncomfortable with this scenario, his leather collar too tight and his mistress too distracted by other matters.

Up to this point, Paul just takes whatever the women are willing to give him, and so this moment, when Paul realizes he’s having bad “sex,” is a striking example of just how far he’s come in terms of self-respect and awareness of his own desires. As difficult as Paul can be to watch at times — personally, this writer has trouble seeing someone whipped onscreen, even if they are enjoying it — it’s also one of Côté’s most affirming, even uplifting films. Paul is both a human being and a media presence, and we see him use social media to craft and curate his own self-image in the process of getting out in the world and interacting with other people. The film is fairly optimistic about the potential of the weird side of the Internet and its ability to bring like-minded souls together rather than impose greater distance. It also bears a paradoxical political subtext. By removing the profit motive and focusing on personal pleasure, Paul recodes human labor, turning it into something gratifying, a means for making himself whole. By reconfiguring exploitation as a libidinal game, Paul (and Paul) shows us one possible route for escaping alienation. If that doesn’t merit a Scrub Daddy sponsorship deal, then what does? — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Being John Smith

“In his new film Being John Smith, premiering alongside Jean-Luc Godard’s for-real-this-time last two films in TIFF’s Wavelengths program, filmmaker John Smith starts with a simple idea, the exceptional commonness of his name, and layers on contradiction after contradiction, accomplishing both deep vulnerability and unusual universality. He begins with a personal history, structured around the childhood nicknames that augmented his indistinct given name. As his height lags behind his peers, “Big John Smith” gives way to the confidence-corroding “Piddly John Smith” before settling at the more amenable “Pid.” At a certain point, an interruption introduces the motif of juxtaposition, as his expression of…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — JESSE CATHERINE WEBBER

Air Base

Though plenty of movies have been made either focusing on the Covid-19 pandemic in a literal way, and even more movies had been converted into limited cast chamber dramas as a result of it (say, KIMI [2022] or A Knock at the Cabin [2023]), very few films understood the strange immediate aftermath of the lockdowns to be an interesting subject itself. And, where most of the United States felt this reintegration process (returning to work, vague masking policies, a tempering of vaccination politics) to be gradual, a change from a locked-down life to one outside one’s apartment building was drastic and subject to immediate reversal. This is especially true for Wuhan, which was thought to be the center of the virus itself and therefore watched over with special attention by its government, keen on being seen as controlling any further spread of the virus. Luo Li’s Air Base captures an odd place at an odd time: Wuhan, China, in 2023, when the lockdowns were finally considered over. Li’s documentary about his hometown shows streets becoming steadily more crowded by shoppers and exercise groups, but the film focuses on the more awkward parts of his friends and family’s reacquaintance with a normal urban life.

Air Base is something of a pun in Mandarin, as “air” can also mean “emptiness” and “air force” can mean one who takes nothing home in fisherman lingo. So, featured at the center of this doc is the Air Base, a pond where the fish never bite, but determined locals try anyway. Here, several men talk to each other about their experience during the lockdowns — one man dreams that the clouds around the mountains have turned to waves, another complains about his now bedridden mother worrying about her job from decades ago in the early hours of the morning. By some miracle, they catch a fish or two. Meanwhile, a young woman walks around the parks of Wuhan, collecting “sighs” into their microphone for a nondescript project. Most of the people who talk to her deny their sighs for either spiritual (”a sigh is too pessimistic”) or health-related reasons; they probably have as much luck as the anglers. Finally, during Wuhan’s early night hours, a man on a small overpass pretends he’s a traffic conductor, waving the cars underneath him to continue driving and stopping completely safe foot traffic until he determines they can pass. These characters sometimes meet each other, but they mostly wander the streets of a city that’s slowly peeking out its head after a long hibernation.

While director Luo Li is interested enough in these people’s conversations to allow them to play out in full, most of Air Base’s runtime consists of shots of Wuhan’s streets, the shopping centers, the vaguely European part of town, the small bridges that light up from multicolor LEDs at night, the Air Base pond, and the light reflecting from the pond in the trees. It’s never quite busy, but it’s a city busy enough to encourage strange interactions, which lighten the mood in between the more serious conversations. In fact, plenty of moments play out like a lighter version of How to with John Wilson — one of the anglers sits beside the road and lights up an entire box of matches one by one; then, a few moments later, the camera lingers on a single broom traveling in the same place on an escalator which nobody, not even a policeman, dares to move. Li is keen to capture these minor eccentricities to which everyone simply acclimates in this gradually re-socialized world. Though some people object to the pretend crossing guard, others are willing to give in to this bit of performance art and politely wait for his go. Then, mirroring stories about suicide are told by the banks of the pond. Everyone’s opening up.

While Li never attempts much beyond this structure, Air Base is not a movie that asks for profound statements or big moments. It’s a casual city symphony that cares much more about a benignly cursed pond than the hustle and bustle of its city officials or recovering industry. Here, there are no jackhammers or honking horns, but a pleasing melody of the pond’s guitar player or the Mandarin karaoke cover of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” fill the void. In the final two-minute shot, a skater at a local park tries again and again to land a simple trick down a step as one of the film’s eccentrics walks in circles on his phone in the background. The young woman records more excuses than sighs, the anglers let their two fish go, and this skater keeps falling even as the dusk creeps in. But in 2023’s Wuhan, there’s a beauty in trying with others at your side or in your periphery — there’s beauty in trying at all. — ZACH LEWIS

Inventory

One often encounters the (admittedly lazy) critical idea that a particular film “would’ve been better as a short,” suggesting that whatever ideas or formal attributes are present simply cannot support a feature-length runtime. Less common is the opposite reaction, a short film that is so rich, so engrossing, that one wishes it were substantially longer. Such is the case with Ivan Marković’s Inventory, a remarkable 20-minute documentary that teases out an entire history of a place with virtually no dialogue or characters, just a series of mesmerizing images. An end title card gives us some contextual information; the Sava Centar, a gargantuan modernist structure in Belgrade, was completed in 1978 as a cultural center and congress for hosting international meetings. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the ‘90s, the building was largely neglected by the state for decades and finally privatized in 2020. After a few false starts, the reconstruction process that we witness in Marković’s film began in earnest. There are brief glimpses of archival footage provided by Stojan Maksimovic, the architect of Sava Centar, who passed away last year, but otherwise Inventory eschews standard documentary form for a more experimental, experiential approach.

Marković has assembled the film into what appear to be “movements” of a sort; it begins with a series of shots that emphasize the lines of the interiors and how they cut through and across the frame. A lingering shot of closed blinds is juxtaposed with large, swooping cloth drapes that extend from floor to ceiling across glass panes. Another shot is simply dozens and dozens of desks stacked on top of one another, followed by a long close-up of what looks like elaborate rebar piping crisscrossing a ceiling. It’s all very quiet and carefully composed, as if these are all sculptural spaces containing found objects. Slowly, human figures appear, finally giving a sense of scale to the place. Now the film’s emphasis becomes the slow, repetitive nature of manual labor; hands scrape up tiling and carpet, while metal pipes and other debris are tossed down stairs into a pile. We see one young man take off his shoe and pick at a blister, before another person comes over and begins to assist him. Brief interstitial shots of old black-and-white photographs show the building when originally under construction, as well as a photo of a group of young workers. There’s a sort of historical narrative here, something about how the young bear the brunt of this sort of labor, as well as the march from Communism to neo-liberalism. It’s not progress necessarily, but an ongoing cycle of creation, destruction, and resurrection. What was once a monument to collective planning — the original building was heralded at the time for being completed in a record amount of time — is now a performance hall only for those wealthy enough to attend. — DANIEL GORMAN

Monikondee

In 2014, the Dutch filmmaking duo of Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan made a film called Episode of the Sea, collaborating with the residents of Urk, a Dutch fishing island. The island’s inhabitants reenacted their lives for the camera in stark, Straubian tableaux, lending their traditional practices a formal rigor and an eerie timelessness. Monikondee, the pair’s new film (co-directed by Tolin Alexander), is by no means as radical as Episode of the Sea, but then it has a very different job to do. Set in Suriname, Monikondee (“money land”) observes the social and economic interactions of the Fiiman people, forest tribes previously called “Maroons.” These communities were founded in the 18th century by escaped enslaved people, and they organized themselves into several ethnic and linguistic groups: the Pamaka, Aluku, and Ndyuka are the ones featured in the film, along with two Indigenous Surinamese peoples, the Kalina and the Wayana.

Monikondee may remind some film festival viewers of an earlier film, Ben Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May, from 2009. Like that film, Monikondee uses Steadicam shots to follow various Fiiman workers as they move between their interior villages and the industrial/commercial areas that surround them. Both films also zero in on the gold mining (mostly controlled by Brazilian interests) that has disrupted the Fiimans’ cooperative economy, alongside contributing to the destruction of rainforests and the polluting of Suriname’s major rivers. But where Russell’s film, organized as a series of long sequence-shots, seemed more interested in simply existing alongside its subjects, Monikondee goes out of its way to draw concrete connections between the various people we see. If the earlier film was more about portraiture, Monikondee is about 21st-century networks that connect tradition, modernity, and hypercapital into a syncretic form of privation.

If there is a main character in Monikondee, it is “Boogie,” a boatman who specializes in transporting goods between the port and the interior villages. While he carries all manner of merchandise in his long wooden craft, most of his deliveries consist of oil in large metal drums. Everyone needs fuel, and so Boogie is a busy man. We see him navigate the Maroni River, along the border between Suriname and French Guiana, and in the course of his travels, we learn about the legal disparity between these two historically interconnected populations. Boogie’s wife is from Guiana, where he can visit but not stay. The Guianese receive social benefits from the French government, whereas the former Dutch colony of Suriname gets no recompense from the Netherlands.

In some ways, Monikondee resembles a Jean Rouch film. As van Brummelen, de Haan, and Alexander move across the region, following various individuals going about their lives, we hear narration in which they explain the nature of their traditions and how “the whites” have corrupted them by introducing a monetary economy. And this is the primary takeaway from Monikondee. The abstraction of money induces selfishness, competition, and a fiduciary incentive to abandon centuries-old cultural practices. What had been a largely communitarian society based on mutual support is quickly growing unsustainable, as the younger generation joins the hustle, working in the mines or selling goods in corner stores. Near the end of Monikondee, the filmmakers show us a map of the Maroni River basin, tracing the movement of people and products. Capitalism keeps people connected, but alters the essential terms of human exchange. This is perhaps best exemplified by a scene in which Boogie delivers water and vegetables to a village, and the women receiving him complain that the vegetables are wilted and there is not all the water they requested. We have watched the boatman risk life and limb to navigate upriver, only to be bitched out like a downtrodden Amazon driver. Cyndi Lauper was right: money changes everything. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Collective Monologue

“Over the course of her filmography, Jessica Sarah Rinland has demonstrated an unusually perceptive eye for the natural world and its inhabitants. Her camera’s fascination with anatomy is obvious from Nulepsy, one of her earliest shorts focused on the titular condition which describes the fictional “pathological need to be nude.” In Expression of the Sightless, a blind man explores a 19th-century sculpture with his hands, the camera only ever focused on the part of the figures where his hands are placed. Elsewhere, and featured more prevalently in her oeuvre, is the relationship between humans and nature. Adeline for Leaves explored the dynamics between a botanical prodigy and her departed mentor, from whom she learned about…” [Previously Published Full Review.]  — JOSHUA PEINADO

In the Manner of Smoke

When Armand Yervant Tufenkian worked as a fire lookout in the forests of Central California, his protracted, expectant gazing into the distance made him wonder if the landscape itself wasn’t provisional — a mere starting point subject to change. Like smoke itself, the potential of which was enough to make him question his own sanity, Tufkenian’s first feature, In the Manner of Smoke, resists singular form. He documents the rituals and formal processes of a fire lookout named Kathy (though we’re led to believe she may also be named Mich Michigan). He observes the methodical brushstrokes of London artist Dan Hays, whose pointillistic landscape paintings of 2015’s Rough Fire in California, Tufenkian commissioned for the film, taking their detailed abstractions as a point of visual inspiration. And, through auto-fictional voiceover that recalls his paranoid wanderings in a long-abandoned Fresno, California, and an encounter with a mysterious woman lamenting the fate of the ancient Wawoma (sequoia) tree, he muses on his role as a passive observer of destruction. The cumulative effect of these strategies on the viewer is a renewed sense of curiosity about the things images can contain, how they contain them, and, just like the forest fires Tufenkian anticipated in his lookout, what happens when containment fails.

This curiosity is borne out of the sheer variety of images Tufenkian includes in his film, constituted by a variety of mediums. The fire lookout, Kathy, guides us through a series of still photographs, her finger tracing the resplendent, mountainous landscapes within their borders. The pictures themselves are representative of Kathy’s professional expertise, for even as Tufenkian lets them command the entire screen, an amateur, no matter how scrupulous, would never identify the legacy of the 2015 fire she sees in them, clear as day.

Hays’ renderings of forest fires, moreover, are themselves challenges to the notion of capture and containment. Through pointillism, he creates something which, like the real-life forest fires, can only be comprehended from a distance. Stand too close, and they become meaningless abstractions, with no context to make one dot or line relate in any way to the one next to it. This kind of meaninglessness is what drove Tufenkian, or the version of himself he projects through his voiceover, to paranoia. He came to see his role as a lookout as inherently futile and passive. When language, such as the lookouts’ Clear Text (which Tufenkian suggests is meant to make their communication efficient rather than clear), falls short, our eyes are all we have. How is he supposed to make sense of a foggy horizon, seen only from the distance, when Hays’ portraits only make sense from far away?

Like the landscapes Tufenkian struggled to interpret, smoke is itself provisional and inherently prone, thanks to its physical properties, to change. The madness he developed during his long weeks at the top of the lookout tower emerged from a sense of passivity he felt against the destruction of the natural world. That madness took the form, in part, of a mysterious (perhaps imagined) woman who told him about the removal of the last Wawomas from the forest. These giants are ancient shepherds of the forest, and their rings an archive of natural history. The few that remain now, the woman says, are only witnesses to death; they look at the forest in horror, alone. Tufenkian comes to realize that he, too, is suffering from this position of witness, which neuters him, like the last remaining Wawoma, from his ability to fight it. In the Manner of Smoke’s premiere is also timely, given the most recent fires that devastated Los Angeles, but if anything, it helps to render the natural forest fire in sharp relief against the external forces that make them occur with unnatural frequency, even if those forces remain beyond the bounds of our vision.

This is all just a taste of In the Manner of Smoke, a film whose layers of meaning become clearer through repeated viewings. If you spend too much time trying to decode its ambiguous narrative threads, you risk losing sight, just as Tufenkian (or his imagined self) did, of the bigger picture. His is a film about witnessing — its challenges, rewards, and political implications. The film’s pleasures, found in the quiet calm of brush strokes, the contemplation of hazy panoramas, and the reveries borne of lonely tedium, arrive, ironically, not by untangling the mystery of Tufenkian’s multivalent narrations, but in recognizing the futility of concrete interpretation. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya

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. — ANDREW REICHEL