Fields of Vision is the title for the fifth Currents program at NYFF this year, and it’s an appropriate title for the five short films whose gestalt tends to be rooted in giving your eyes a workout. There are two 3D movies, two featuring prominent use of flicker, and a multi-projector 16mm piece — they’re a group of films that mostly make the case for being seen theatrically if they’re going to be seen at all. The title is also an apt one for a selection of films that were all heavily tied into the daily lives of the directors and manipulations of what they saw, from Blake Williams taking a road trip with his family to Jodie Mack’s continued attempts to capture the essence of her supposedly “unphotographable” garden. Mack’s film Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love is structured in four chapters reflecting each part of the title, all of which are based around floral specimens. The shift from single flowers getting to show off their petals as a potential Lover to the bombastic flicker of the Love-making finale traces a dramatic arc from sexual conception to exquisitely beautiful corpses. Her garden may be unphotographable, but the flowers it produces are all ideal models in the seemingly infinite number of poses they can strike.
Operating on a grander scale than the short lives of flowers, Jiayi Chen’s expanded cinema piece As a Tree Walks to Its Forest finds three different ways to walk through the woods. More than anything else here, it’s a live production: three projectors showing loops of 16mm and unsplit 8mm, all centered around trees and forests. The effect of the three projection channels produces a sort of series of panels and triptychs, with the trees forming new shapes as you hear the sound of projector motors being turned on and off. (This had the occasional issue of people’s heads accidentally entering the frame at its Lincoln Center showing, which gave new meaning to “hair in the gate.”) The other four films in the program tended to go for a certain aggression in creating new visual patterns, but the simpler serenity of trees emerging in and out of darkness made As a Tree Walks to Its Forest an ideal closer.
One doesn’t really need to see Peter Larsson’s animated collage Keyhole Conversation, the one weak link in the group, but it’s a harmless little doodle that doesn’t outstay its welcome and might point viewers in the direction of the director it derives most of its gestalt from in Robert Breer. A much more interesting homage to an avant-garde legend comes from Williams’ FELT, which is clearly affectionate toward Ernie Gehr’s early digital classic Glider (2001). Gehr used a gigantic camera obscura at the Cliff House in San Francisco to distort the waves of the ocean so that they looked like they’d swallow the sky, but Williams takes this exact same sight and renders it in the 3D medium he specializes in to enhance their seductive curls. FELT is the more ambitious of the two 3D films in the program in the sheer number of 3D effects it pulls out of its hat. Since it was structured around a road trip, the more disparate nature of different locales and different formal tricks is baked into the fun of it. The film opens with slideshow photographs of landscapes of the kind we might associate with our childhood, but those are the only normal landscapes here — the use of 3D turns them into bizarre angles and stuttering motion blur. Williams explicitly compares them to origami folds, which require you to make your own mountains and valleys by folding them up: a delightful mission statement. This commitment to making your own way is enhanced by the fact that there’s only one Aerosmith song playing on the car radio, a droll joke Williams might have cribbed from another notable experimental film with a particularly apt title: James Benning and Bette Gordon’s The United States of America.
While it’s not as ambitious in its use of 3D, Victor Van Rossem’s Toward a Fundamental Theory of Physics is perhaps the strongest film in a mostly excellent group for using it for a single, precise purpose. The visuals in Physics are inextricable from the camera Van Rossem designed and 3D-printed himself. His own variation on the TimeSlice camera, best known for being a sort of prototype for the “bullet time” effects in The Matrix, has 293 lenses designed to run a single strip of film in a simultaneous fashion. When combined with lengthy exposures and the conversion to 3D, the colored lights that Van Rossem waved around in front of the camera flow into one another and into the viewer’s eyes effortlessly. The effect is somewhere in between a Man Ray photogram or if a hand-painted film was made out of light. It’s intensely beautiful, but the charmingly homemade quality occasionally pops up in the form of our filmmaker himself, briefly visible as a distorted image, waving the lights like a conductor who doesn’t call attention to himself. It’s the most unexpected element from this program to appear in one’s own field of vision, but given the abundance of homemade charm on display in all the titles, perhaps it was foreshadowed all along.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 6.
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