The third and final Wavelengths group program, Slightest Pretense, is a decidedly mixed bag, although it does contain the two best films in the entire series. The program takes its name from the title of Eri Saito’s film, and inasmuch as a specific theme can be identified among the six works in the show, it has to do with an expanded idea of landscape. In the nineties and through the noughts, landscape cinema proved to be a dominant trend in experimental film, perhaps best exhibited by the films of James Benning, Rose Lowder, and the late Peter Hutton. As we have seen with the newer iterations of structural film, filmmakers have taken this somewhat classical form and found new ways to adapt it, exploring how specific locales can reveal deeper social connections as well as a materialist connection to history. This is a tendency we see in the films of Shambhavi Kaul, Jodie Mack, Ben Rivers, and many others. Whether or not it is intentional, these contemporary filmmakers seem to have tapped into Japanese maverick Masao Adachi’s “landscape theory,” in the sense that relations of power can be critically read in otherwise ordinary spaces. A mode of filmmaking with its origins in 19th and 20th century painting and photography, the new landscape cinema permits us to examine locations as accretions of community and conflict, and not simply as the empty void in which human history happens.
This is always a complicated matter, and one of the benefits of experimental film is that it can provide a laboratory in which these issues can be explored. Saito’s film, Slightest Pretense, is based on Cogwheels, a posthumously published novel by Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Thought to be a partly autobiographical work, it is the story of a young man whose grasp on reality is shaken by optical phenomena in his perception, specifically a plethora of translucent cogwheels whirling in his line of sight. Although the tenor of the novel suggests that these hallucinations are reflective of his inner turmoil, it is more likely they were part of a chronic migraine aura, specifically a condition known as “scintillating scotoma.” Saito shows us a young man (Hisao Kurozumi) who is attempting to go about his day but is continually distracted by visual disturbances. He looks at the ocean, the park, the hills, and he is disoriented by a heightened glare. In an interesting bit of synecdoche, Saito essentially uses the thick, swirling grain of 8mm film to stand in for the aura that the man is experiencing.
But one thing that’s odd about Slightest Pretense is the fact that, while Saito mentions scintillating scotoma in the press materials for the film, there is no indication within the film that this is part of her subject. So as one watches Pretense, there’s a disconnection between the point of view shots that comprise the non-narrative elements (and their intense use of natural light) and the actor’s movement throughout the space. A fictional space is implied, but unlike certain other allusive, narrative-adjacent experimentalists, like Lewis Klahr or Zachary Epcar, Saito has some trouble bringing these two strands of material into conversation. Originally Slightest Pretense was part of a larger gallery installation, and it’s possible that some of the paracinematic elements in that exhibition helped contextualize the film in ways that just don’t come across when it’s presented on its own. Saito’s subject is a fascinating one, and it taps into a particular strain of somatic explanation for modernist invention. Over the years, various critics have suggested that modernist vision may have some biological basis, from Van Gogh’s spirals of color to Picasso’s jagged planes. These hypotheses are interesting as far as they go, but they also have the potential to pathologize formal experimentation. I don’t think for a minute that that’s what Saito is trying to do, but Slightest Pretense doesn’t really guard against it either.
In terms of experimental narratives, Land of Barbar by Tunisian filmmaker Fredj Moussa is a simpler but more successful film, one that is plainspoken while at the same time hinting at deeper mysteries. Moussa has loosely adapted a part of The Decameron, but explicitly narrative meaning only exists in the prologue and epilogue. As Land of Barbar begins, we are on the beach and see a boat in the distance. Soon it arrives on land, and a young woman with a veil looks down into the craft to see another woman, sans veil, sleeping. She wakes up and asks where she is, and she is informed that she is “near Sousse, in the land of Barbar.” The woman in the veil is the narrator, and she mentions that she could tell the woman in the boat was Christian “by her clothes.” The two communicate in Latin, and we recognize that Moussa is setting up a kind of cross-cultural gaze. We see the young Tunisian woman encounter the (presumed) Westerner, and we perceive her as she does. Then, the film does some rather interesting things.
Moussa shows us close-ups of locals, including shepherds and fishermen. We see a close-up of two hands holding unleavened bread. Another hand holds up a fish. We see a donkey’s head poking into the frame. All of these shots are static, and have a flat, declarative character, somewhere between Eisenstein and Bresson. But their contents, as well as their sunlit evenness, gives the sense of a highly formal anthropological film. We are seeing images that suggest metonymy, not so much representing themselves but standing in for “coastal Tunisian culture.” But then, this metonymic reduction appears to be from the point of view of the Western visitor. She is lost and trying to get her bearings, and so her engagement with her surroundings is nominative rather than experiential. Toward the end, Moussa gives us wider shots, situating his performers in broader contexts, but at least three times, we see them with tentpoles across their shoulders, wearing large swaths of cloth in a configuration that is part apparel, part shelter. Moussa ends by saluting “the Barbarians,” and although Land of Barbar isn’t reducible to a single meaning, the film does seem to jokingly critique the ethnographic gaze, the tendency to see people not as individuals but as representatives of their culture, part of the landscape.
On a purely formal level, Blake Williams’ FELT is the most radical in the program, since it most dramatically deviates from the standard mode of cinematic vision. For years, Williams has been at the forefront of adapting 3D image technologies for personal and philosophical ends. Whereas mainstream use of 3D tends to apply a veneer of tactility to otherwise diversionary entertainment, Williams pushes it in the direction of Cézanne, inviting the viewer to lose themselves in the strange anomalies that exist between flatness and depth. While watching FELT, those familiar with Williams’ film work will notice some echoes of earlier efforts. From the curling waves, reprised from his 2017 feature film PROTOTYPE, to the reappearance of origami, which was one of the motifs of his Many a Swan (2012), Williams appears to be on a sentimental journey. Based in part on a road trip across the U.S. that the filmmaker took with his parents, FELT is an exploration of how 3D technology can visually define the landscape of a nation that, to borrow a term from Herbert Marcuse, is becoming increasingly one-dimensional. The film begins with images of mountains seen through an old Viewmaster toy. The still frames give way to moving images, initially night shots of passing streetlamps, as one might’ve done as a kid lying back and looking up from the back seat. Then we see a more conventional landscape rushing past as the car speeds down the highway.
We hear pop songs along with bits of talk radio and DJ chatter, and the middle American landscape looks awfully flat. We can see planes receding and, once Williams shows us some canyons and hillsides, we can see the paradoxical optical work of the 3D, making these sublime vistas appear like stage sets. Even as we see people moving through this space, it feels somehow cramped and concertinaed, Williams’ cinematography emphasizing the device, a “cinema of attractions” that asks to look at how we’re looking just as much as the scenes we and Williams are looking at. The landscape of the American West becomes a metaphor even as it insists upon its intractability, its Mesozoic thereness. Williams, a Texan who has lived in Toronto for several years, seems to find himself at a creasing point, poised on the fold between native and outsider. Is this the country he once lived in? Can it be saved? Rather than make a fetish of these purple mountain majesties, Williams suggests that we must put our eyes to work, reassemble the national space, in order to reclaim its depth and make it habitable once more. FELT is precise but also deeply personal, a notable stylistic shift for Williams and easily one of the best experimental films of the year.
Another filmmaker who has explored the cinematic potentials of optical play, Björn Kämmerer often tends to instigate small, almost imperceptible changes within a reduced frame of reference. Like a number of his Austrian peers, Kämmerer has been deeply influenced by structural film, but chooses to take its precepts in somewhat different directions. Whereas “classical” structuralism was largely ontological, investigating how the human mind perceives sounds and images, Kämmerer’s contemporary mode is more epistemological. How do we know which sounds and images to trust? When is deception a bit of fun cinematic gamesmanship, and when is it outright deceit? His new film CONFERENCE has a rather ironic title. Just as Kämmerer’s 2018 film Arena actually showed everything but the arena, CONFERENCE implies a collection of people but, for the most part, we only ever see one at a time.
Then again, there are more people assembled around this campfire than it would first appear. Using a rotating camera, Kämmerer moves the viewer around the fire, revealing a man on the left and then a man on the right. They don’t speak. Every so often when we are shown one man straight on, we see the shadow of the other man’s head or shoulder. The filmic syntax of CONFERENCE tells us fairly early on what we can expect from the film, but before we’ve realized it, Kämmerer is toying with us. In some respects, he is showing us less than meets the eye: sequences are so nondescript that it takes a minute to recognize they’re being repeated. But in other ways, there’s a lot more to be seen, and it takes a constant testing and revision of our awareness to really see the film. If a certain strain of academic film theory places the viewer in the driver’s seat, Karmmerer shows us that it’s difficult to make sense of the moving vehicle we call reality.
Austria is represented by two of the six films in Wavelengths 3. Whereas Kämmerer’s work often feigns minimalism to provoke a perceptual chiasmus, Friedl vom Gröller’s poetic shorts are poignant precisely because they are modest and unassuming. One of at least two new films vom Gröller has released this year (the other one, Emergency Exit, debuted at the Berlinale), Conditio Humana follows the filmmaker’s trusty template. For years now she has been producing the cinematic equivalent of sketchbook drawings, works that tell us a little bit on their own but resonate more broadly across her entire corpus. Under three minutes, as FvG’s films usually are, Conditio combines portraiture with classical statuary in a sort of temporal collapse of then and now. After all, if there is anything that can truly be called the human condition, it must include commonalities as well as differences, the eternal alongside the transitory. At one point vom Gröller shows us a young man and woman in a doorway, suddenly going their separate ways and revealing a piazza beyond the threshold. This seconds-long gesture tells us so much about love’s ebb and flow, and points both to the world outside and the fact that hundreds of other couples have stood in that same spot over the centuries.
The penultimate film in the program, Morgenkreis (“Morning Circle”) by Palestinian filmmaker Basma Al-Sharif, is a major work by any measure, and if the reader will indulge me, I want to discuss it at some length. It is rare that a film succeeds in both aesthetic and political terms, but Morgenkreis absolutely does, which makes it not only one of the best films of the year, but also one of the most urgent. It adopts a number of recognizable filmic languages in order to reveal their authoritarian undercurrents, and this permits Al-Sharif to patch into the affect associated with those modes and direct those energies in unexpected ways.
Morgenkreis begins with a series of traveling shots through the windows and sunroof of a moving car. The vehicle is moving through the center of Berlin, past Potsdamer Platz and eventually into an apartment block in what’s clearly a poor section of town. Throughout, there is a series of synthesizer chords, a vaguely noirish soundtrack from a stereotypically European film. The angles, the shots of the buildings, the overcast lighting and the texture of the celluloid, all very much suggest a sort of late-20th century thriller, the sort of project that Dominik Graf does so well. Clearly influenced by Fassbinder but much chillier and more controlled, it’s an establishing shot that gives us a damaged, dangerous Berlin. As the Steadicam moves through the plaza and up the stairs, we eventually end up in a man’s apartment. This is Mr. Abrahamyan (Panos Aprahamian), an Armenian immigrant who lives there with his young son Adnan (Mohammad Ali).
The man is smoking in the shadows near his windows. Almost immediately he is accosted by a disembodied German voice. “Do you plan to stay in Germany? Are you permitted to leave? Do you identify with Germany?” and on and on. We soon realize that this camera is attached to a specific point of view, that of an unseen agent of the state, questioning Abrahamyan in an official or unofficial capacity. For his part, he answers casually and with some slight disdain. “What does your child’s mother do?” “Well, you should ask her.” The situation that Al-Sharif has staged here is complex because it’s moving in multiple directions at once. The German voice speaks with the full authority of national prerogative, and given the fact that this interrogation is happening in Abrahamyan’s own home, we get a clear sense that these are questions that are demanded of him, and of other immigrants, all the time, whether or not they are actually being posed. The voice of protectionism, of institutional power, of the general atmosphere of the AfD right wing, is ever-present.
Al-Sharif’s sound design is particularly noteworthy. She uses different musical soundtracks — the synthesizer theme, some Arabic hip-hop, etc. — and suddenly cuts to silence. This makes the questions Abrahamyan is facing seem that much more abrupt and intrusive. We see him getting Adnan ready for kindergarten. They watch a little TV, the dad clips his son’s fingernails, and we see the traces of their lives in the apartment. There are marker drawings on the fridge, and half-completed art projects on the coffee table. It is all very warm and intimate, until we remember that our visual mapping of this space is aligned with the authoritarian gaze.
As they set out for school, Adnan plays a bit on the playground, and he and Abrahamyan kick a soccer ball around. The camera follows them at a low angle, which makes these scenes rather unnerving, like the surveilling eye is now fixated on Adnan. Soon, we are at the door of Adnan’s class, and his dad tries to drop him off. But he is scared and doesn’t want to go. Three different kindergarten teachers, all warm and smiling and reassuring, try to coax Adnan inside, and eventually one of them has to gently restrain the child as his father walks away. The other children are sitting in their morning circle, waiting for Adnan to join them. Once he is inside, we see the kids and adults dancing, playing, making music, and a joyous song by Egyptian musician Maurice Louca plays on the soundtrack. Al-Sharif uses a spinning, 360° camera to show the activities in the kindergarten, and this is blended with scenes outside the Abrahamyans’ apartment, as well as a group of people walking down a street en masse, some sort of caravan or perhaps a protest. Finally, we see Adnan on the playground, spinning around until he gets dizzy and falls down.
There is a reading of these final scenes that is uniformly positive, indicative of the pitfalls of liberal thinking that Al-Sharif so skillfully avoids. It is true that, compared with the interrogation received by the boy’s father, the kindergarten is a welcoming place. It’s a space filled with happy children of several different cultures and races, and the adults are clearly nurturing. But Adnan’s trepidation reminds us that this school is another official space of German authority, and no amount of goodwill or anti-racist intentions can change that fact. Somehow Adnan understands that he is not entirely safe in this place, regardless of the fact that the space is populated by people who appear to be actively working against prejudice. With Morning Circle, Al-Sharif shows us that the reach of the nation is insidious. It creeps into the immigrant’s daily life, enforcing a sense of never truly belonging. This is a legacy of oppression, one that cannot simply be wished away. It must be constantly negotiated, and on some level Adnan has already learned this sad truth. The same actor who questions his father’s right to be a German, a man named Philip Widman, also plays one of the kindly schoolteachers.
Al-Sharif’s achievement here is to make us feel the palpable double-consciousness, the uncanny sense of threat, that permeates “benevolent” host nations like a noxious gas. It is a pressure that doesn’t relent, and it is made even more insidious because we often cannot point to it or describe it. In fact, it may appear to be entirely absent. But immigrant minorities feel this pressure everywhere. They internalize it, it hovers in the most private spaces, and follows them like a photographic drone. We perceive it but have trouble even explaining its existence, in large part because liberals need to believe it is no longer there. That pressure, that omniscient surveilling eye, is the State. Morning Circle describes this phenomenon. It points to it, and demands that we too feel its contours as it closes in around us, by force or with a welcoming smile.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 5.
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