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.
Published as part of Cinéma du Réel 2025.
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