The first of this year’s Wavelengths short film programs begins, appropriately enough, with Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon, a 2016 work by Tomonari Nishikawa, who passed away this past April at the age of 56. Nishikawa was a fixture at Wavelengths over the years, easily one of the most respected filmmakers and educators of his time. Nishikawa’s films were poetic and precise. Like some other experimentalists of his generation, he found his voice in a period characterized by the abatement of certain backlashes against the past. Brakhage (‘too solipsistic!”) and structural film (“too rationalist!”) were fair game once again, approaches that a filmmaker could adapt to their own aesthetic projects as appropriate. Nishikawa demonstrated this better than most. His films are about exploring our ability to perceive and respond to reality, to really think about what we could see and hear.
Ten Mornings is a perfect example of Nishikawa’s idiosyncratic formalism. A series of shots of bridges in Japan, the film is vertically striated in bands of relative light and dark. Once a car is seen crossing a bridge, the viewer figures out what’s up. Nishikawa has taken the same shot from the exact same position several times, under varying light conditions, and pieced the shots together into a single image. So a moving vehicle will arrive within one “slat” but vanish behind the others. Ten Mornings braids the landscape into discrete but nearly identical views. Watching the film again, it becomes clear that the composite images are a lot like test strips from a darkroom, wherein a photographer exposes a negative with increasing or decreasing apertures in order to find the best settings. Upon recognizing this, something clicks about the film, and about almost all of Nishikawa’s work. His films, perfectly constructed as they were, seem to reveal the editing process. An editor typically sees his or her footage dozens if not hundreds of times, and inevitably discovers new aspects of the material over time. Nishikawa’s films displayed that process of discovery, sharing his own unexpected perceptions with the viewer.
The other films presented in Map of Traces share this unique quality of discovery, an engagement with the mundane or quotidian that reveals unexpected phenomenological depth. The program takes its title from a new mid-length film by Hong Kong’s Chan Hau Chun. Chan has made a film that emphasizes the physical presence and solidity of her city while also making us acutely aware of its distance, the fact that most of what she remembers about it is slipping away or being actively erased. The film opens in a park, and we immediately notice that people’s faces are blurred out. Given the location, a viewer might initially think Chan is protecting the identities of those captured by her camera. But soon she begins moving us around and through the frame, and we realize these are Google Earth images. We hear two voices talk about this place, how there are banyan trees and one time Chan was asked to meet her father in this park but she decided not to show up. The filmmaker mentions that she currently lives in the U.K. Although we are not explicitly told that Chan cannot return to Hong Kong, there is a kind of resignation in her speech, a sadness in the fact that once she lived in this “picture,” and must now scroll through it like a web-browsing tourist.
The second half of Map of Traces is a bit more documentary-like in its style and mode of address. We meet a man who describes having been arrested for painting dian, or mourning symbols, on various public walls. He was captured by CCTV and admits his surprise in learning he was a wanted criminal. As we see, he still paints these symbols but does so in water alone, so that the brushstrokes evaporate almost instantly. Chan concretizes his painted symbols onscreen, allowing us to see them as temporary monuments. The remainder of Chan’s film captures fleeting moments, like a couple of friends holding hands, or the elongated shadows of people walking in the city. There’s an almost Jim Jennings feel to these gestures, but Chan makes us aware that these tiny shards of life are also politically-laden, since she must now find the real Hong Kong in the intervals between discrete events. Additionally, every so often Chan interrupts the film with letters to someone named C.R. The tone of the letters is intimate, and it is clear that the writer longs to be with this person again but it is presently impossible to do so. While these words literalize the distance between the artist and her subject, they also implicitly connect the current plight of Hongkongers to that of dislocated people through the ages, ordinary lives torn asunder by the oppressive conditions of their own historical moments.
One of the year’s best and most surprising films is 09/05/1982 by Colombian filmmakers Jorge Caballero Ramos and Camilo Restrepo. A film that is somehow both shocking and entirely inevitable, 09/05/1982 initially looks like a very particular kind of experimental documentary. It shows seemingly ordinary scenes of street life in “Latin America.” Quotation marks are necessary here because Caballero and Restrepo don’t tell us where the film takes place, but it contains specific elements that consumers of contemporary media have come to associate with Latin America: older downtown areas, the prevalence of construction and infrastructure work, young boys playing soccer in a field, and above all, walls covered with “resistance” graffiti.
A voiceover discusses “the events” of May 9, 1982, seemingly from the perspective of a head of state or official dignitary. He describes the unrest, and the government’s heavy-handed suppression of that unrest, arguing that the rebels left them no choice. It was necessary to maintain public order and protect private property. As this voiceover continues, a viewer may be searching their memories, trying to recall what happened on May 9, and where. Is this a part of modern political history we’ve somehow forgotten? In the final minutes, 09/05/1982 gives in to the odd anomalies that we’ve been noticing all along, the eerie sense that something is off. When Caballero and Restrepo reveal their hand, we are brought up short. Why did these images compel belief? Because they are stereotypical images, the sort that the media has been feeding us for decades. It’s a disturbing but predictable trajectory: first the racism, then the slop.
Austria’s Viktoria Schmid is in the program with Rojo Žalia Blau, a sequel of sorts to NYC RBG from last year. Rojo Žalia Blau applies the same color separation technique seen in the previous film to a broader geographical canvas. The new work was shot across three different locations: Spain, Lithuania, and Austria. Whereas the New York film was a geometrically oriented city-symphony, Rojo Žalia Blau is predominantly a landscape film. Schmid pays particular attention to the light through trees and across the leaf-strewn ground, and how the division of the image into distinct bands of color generates a kind of differential illumination. The outlines of things tend to get fuzzier, even as the prism lines between the hues are hard-edged. From a technical standpoint, Schmid really doesn’t add or subtract from her approach in NYC RBG, but it’s a lovely work that demonstrates how a method’s results are changed when applied in different circumstances.
Sohrab Hura is a multimedia artist, and his interest in experimental film appears to be an outgrowth of his work as a painter. A small, subtle single-shot effort, Disappeared plays nicely with the haze one can sometimes coax from digital cinematography. Discernible as a tent in the woods, occasionally with figures moving around it, Hura’s film is primarily a color study, its washed-out sea green an organic visual pillow for a somewhat more distinct peach-orange form. In the final seconds, Hura recontextualizes everything we’d been watching for the previous five minutes. It’s a pleasant enough film, and given Hura’s devotion to 2D creation, it makes one think about the particular way that painters and photographers sometimes employ 4D media to distill time, or to add a bounded moment of contemplation to what is essentially a still image.
Finally, this year’s program marks the TIFF debut of Russian-born maverick Vadim Kostrov, with his 15-minute silent film En traversée. The festival’s catalog description compares Kostrov’s film to Rothko, and this is by no means incorrect. Yes, there are Rothko moments when the screen is subdivided into bands of complementary or contrasting colors. But over the course of its fifteen silent minutes, En traversée covers so much ground, literally and figuratively, that no single painterly paradigm can account for everything we see. The film is nonstop motion, almost all of it going from left to right in a blur that conveys an unfocused gaze out of a train window. Kostrov keeps his lens at just the right setting so that even though it’s direction we see and not “things,” we can just barely make out the landscape, or the outline of a building, or vehicles moving alongside the traveling camera. Because everything is pitched right up to the point of intelligibility, we only register what we think we’ve seen after it is gone. So Kostrov plays a cognitive game with us, placing all representation in the past tense.
There are a few moments where the camera tilts away from its horizontal axis, and the perpendicular forms that have dominated the image suddenly appear diagonal. This momentarily takes us out of the realm of abstract painting and more firmly into architecture, or at least architectural photography. And in the final moments, En traversée takes an impressive gamble by drawing us back into verisimilitude, never resolving into direct depiction but offering us, indeed, a silhouette of a woman, her shadow cast on the window of a moving train. This decision could have backfired, as if Kostrov were grounding the preceding abstraction in the point of view of an interior spectator. But it has a very different effect. The speed and the mutations of the forms onscreen make it impossible for a viewer to fixate on what we’re seeing. Full concentration isn’t really possible, because the material is so protean and gestural. Instead, we have to give it a constant glance. And when we see the shadow of the woman, we’re reminded of all the other aspects of the environment, the human aspects, from which we’ve been given such a playful respite.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 1.
Comments are closed.