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Murmur (Heather Young, 2019)

Debut films are often tricky melanges of shopworn cliches and the unique ideas that made the artist want to make the movie in the first place. It's almost as though, in trying to figure out how to give shape to those inchoate sounds and images rattling around in their heads, novice filmmakers instinctively fall back on simple formal containers. This approach also has the added benefit of serving as a Janus-faced calling card, since at this stage in ...

Ghost Strata (Ben Rivers, 2019)

Although Rivers is getting most of his festival exposure this year with Krabi, 2562, the feature he co-directed with Thai helmer Anocha Suwichakornpong, he also made a medium-length solo work that, while perhaps more of a piece with his previous work than Krabi, nevertheless represents a significant departure as well. Rivers' work has typically operated in a zone I would call the non-argumentative cinema of fact, a lyrical document...

Letter to the Editor (Alan Berliner, 2019)

In his characteristic essay-film way, Berliner uses a framing device -- his personal relationship to the New York Times -- to consider a range of broader issues. But much of the film really is about the problem of print journalism's twilight years, its replacement by the big scary Internet, and Trump's exacerbation of the popular distrust of the news media. Formally, LttE is more interesting in idea than conception, seeing as it is composed...

Jordan River Anderson, The Messenger (Alanis Obomsawin, 2019)

For all my dedication to Canadian cinema, this is the first time I have watched a documentary by Obomsawin, the revered filmmaker who is at this point the world's leading chronicler of the experience of First Peoples. (I'll admit that the fact that this was a short one encouraged me to knuckle down and get to work.) And although Obomsawin's work was largely the sort of docu-activism that I anticipated, I was indeed impressed with her lyricism and at...

We Still Have to Close Our Eyes (John Torres, 2019)

Among the various directors of the Filipino New Wave, John Torres (Todo todo teros, Lukas the Strange) has always been one of the strangest and most original. This newest work is long on concept but comes up short on delivery, feeling like a sketch for something that Torres might choose to more fully realize at a later date. The visual material is taken from documentary / behind the scenes footage shot on other directors' film sets...

Remembrance: A Portrait Study (Edward Owens, 1967)

The films of 60s experimentalist Edward Owens, which were rediscovered and restored not too long ago, provide a voice that had been missing from American avant-garde history for far too long. An African-American filmmaker who studied with Gregory J. Markopoulos, Owens provides a partial correction to the story of experimental film in the 1960s, a story which has been overwhelmingly white. Remembrance is a dark, dense film, with extended pas...

Book of Hours (Annie McDonell, 2019)

A brief film composed of gentle, quotidian gestures, Book of Hours is elegant in its subtlety. In the film, McDonell focuses on the domestic sphere, one of a number of possible "spaces" of activity that could have served as her primary stage. (Early in the film, we hear a voice reciting a litany of different phrases with the word "space" in them, an homage to a poem called "Species of Space" by Georges Perec. These words implicate all the l...

Who's Afraid of Ideology? (Marwa Arsanios, 2019)

Beginning with a woman thumbing through a notebook of pressed plants, detailing the ailments that can be cured with each one, Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part 2 soon becomes wider in scope, exploring the broader connections between people and the land. In this case, Arsanios is offering the viewer a portrait of Jinwar, a new village coming into being in the Kurdish territory of Syria. What makes this village unique is that is that it will b...

Hrvoji, Look at You From the Tower (Ryan Ferko, 2019)

Ryan Ferko has presented a number of films in festivals past, although those previous entries have been co-directed by Faraz and Parastoo Anoushahpour. They are both listed in the credits of Hrvoji as collaborators, but Ferko is credited as the sole filmmaker, and this in itself is intriguing. Although the trio's films have been quite impressive, I have always detected a sense of formal modesty in their work, a tendency to downplay their pr...

Second Generation (Miryam Charles, 2019)

A film that hints at a narrative but is presented as an assemblage of fragments, Second Generation suggests a love affair, a pending marriage, a history of migration and resettlement, and a sense that the shifting and unmooring of cultural identities may be playing a role in creating strife between the apparent couple, "M." and "J." Slightly reminiscent of certain films by Su Friedrich, Second Generation creates text / image relati...

Transcript (Erica Sheu, 2019)

I had the good fortune to first come across Erica Sheu's Transcript back in March when I was previewing films for the SF Crossroads Festival, where it stood out from the pack quite powerfully. But it's a quiet power, to be sure. There may not be a more delicate, unassuming film in the Wavelengths series this year, but Transcript is striking nonetheless. It is essentially a still life, although part of what makes the film unique is ...

The Bite (Pedro Neves Marques, 2019)

Another form of tropical malady has taken hold in Sao Paolo, and it's up to a group of renegade entomologist-epidemiologists to stop the plague, not by finding a cure to the disease itself, but by releasing a genetically-modified mosquito that will disrupt the transmission of the virus by making its carriers incapable of reproduction, Or is that really their agenda at all?

2019-09-05 07:58:21 +0000 UTC View Post

SaF05 (Charlotte Prodger, 2019)

SaF05, the latest video work by Turner Prize winner Charlotte Prodger, could perhaps be considered a video essay, although to call it that would imply a level of directness and clarity SaF05 doesn't have. The work is much more like a constellation of tangentially related concepts, a set of suspended metaphors that are concatenated across the running time without achieving an absolute conclusion. In fact, Prodger is using the positi...

Sun Rave (Roy Samaha, 2019)

Roy Samaha's Sun Rave is a complex, knotty little film that, like the espionage agents described in it, does not give up its secrets easily. By bringing a number of unlikely ideas into orbit around each other, the film leads the viewer not to conclusions but to hints and suspicions, to concepts just out of reach. Because it leaves some of its most impressive maneuvers suspended, Sun Rave lingers in the mind.

2019-09-04 18:57:25 +0000 UTC View Post

Slow Volumes (Mike Gibisser, 2019)

A bit of domestic abstraction, Slow Volumes employs a 35mm camera at the center axis of both a living room and a particular point in a field outdoors, and spins out a highly relatable horizontal blur regarding those things closest to its maker. Granted, we cannot be certain that the people and things on display are Mike Gibisser's home and family, but there is undoubtedly a rhetoric of familiarity at work that organizes the film. Stripes of...

Black Sun (Maureen Fazendiero, 2019)

Taking as its ostensible topic the recent partial solar eclipse, Fazendiero’s film is a meditation on the role that light plays in shaping reality and our consciousness of it. To this end, we hear a recording of Delphine Seyrig on the soundtrack, reading a poem by Henri Michaux about a land where sunlight is a rare, precious commodity.

Fazendiero opens the film with tinted images – mountains, volcanoes, waterfalls – that resemble the eth...

Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (Jessica Sarah Rinland, 2019)

For the Viennale catalog, I wrote the following:

Not all reproductions are mechanical, even in our age of digital imagery, 3D printing, and instantaneous communication. It is still necessary to create physical facsimiles of various artifacts of material culture, such as fossils, ancient pottery and tools. These objects are, after all, documents, and as such they must be backed up, like any archive. There is too much global knowledge at stake t...

San Vittore (Yuri Ancarani, 2019)

It is easy (if nonetheless necessary) to criticize power in its most heinous manifestations. If we consider, for example, the Trump administration's disgusting anti-immigration policies and weaponization of ICE, with random raids on law-abiding families and peaceful communities, caged children denied medicine and soap, or toddlers representing themselves in their own deportation hearings, there is obviously no question that, at the very least, we ar...

This Action Lies (James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2018)

Commissioned last year by a Swiss gallery but world premiering only now, Kienitz Wilkins' latest featurette nevertheless arrives piping hot. In fact, it should probably come with a warning. In a field that generally prizes image composition above all else, with sound design coming in a distant second, Kienitz Wilkins is a true rarity: an avant-garde filmmaker for whom the written word is his primary vehicle of expression. (In fact one recent work, <...

Circumplector (Gastón Solnicki, 2019)

In Latin, circumplector means that which is all-encompassing. True to form, Argentinian experimentalist Solnicki (Kékszakállú) enfolds nearly everything in less than three minutes: sculpture, architecture, devotional music, a painterly still life, a bit of portraiture, and the inklings of a narrative. In the film’s evocative first image, we see a statue being removed from Notre Dame, just two days, as it happens, before the ca...

Cézanne (Luke Fowler, 2019)

Live from Aix-en-Provence comes an unusual new film from Luke Fowler. Although his work tends to be discursive in its exploration of cultural history, here he lets the images do the talking, using his camera like a paintbrush to explore a complex dichotomy. The abundant flora, the quality of light, and of course the triumphant Mt. Saint-Victoire, all remain as Cézanne found them over 125 years ago. But around those elements has sprouted a commercia...

Billy (Zachary Epcar, 2019)

Billy is a talkie.

Epcar is one of the most interesting among the current crop of younger filmmakers, in part because his stock in trade seems to be a collection of ineffable moods. He's a bit like Laida Lertxundi and Jennifer Reeder in this respect, although thus far, Epcar is a bit harder to place. His film Return to Forms was a study of varying textures of manufactured goods, a kind of catalog of prefab shells and skins on...

Heavy Metal Detox (Josef Dabernig, 2019)

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the intersection of experimental cinema and horror. A lot of this was occasioned by work coming out of Austria, birthplace of Freud and the uncanny, and perhaps not coincidentally the locus of some pretty bracing stuff in the avant-garde art world. There's the Viennese Aktionists, of course, with their ritual bloodletting and headlong dive into primitive regression. And, as if to make that irr...

E-Ticket (Simon Liu, 2019)

Simon Liu, who grew up between Hong Kong and the U.K. and is now based in New York City, has a distinctly urban sensibility in his films, even when the spaces he's depicting are not cities per se. They often are, but his films also include rural areas, far flung global locales, and a lot of interstitial "non-places" of modern travel. There are two characteristics that distinguish Liu's cinema above all. One is velocity, a feeling of hurtling through...

Amusement Ride (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2019)

Q: What's a 'structural film'?

A: That's easy! Everybody knows what a structural film is! It's when engineers design an airplane or a bridge, and they build a model to find out if it will fall apart too soon. The film shows where all the stresses are!

(Owen Land, On the Marriage Broker Joke...)

Although not really a maker of structural films per se, Tomonari Nishikawa is a dedicated formalist whose work e...

(tourism studies) (Joshua Gen Solondz, 2019)

Joshua Gen Solondz consistently makes some of the most unusual films around. Part of this has to do with a polymorphic sensibility that I have not quite put my finger on yet -- sometimes abstract and geometrical, at other times jagged and painterly, and at still other times exhibiting a psychotronic punk attitude. His latest, intriguingly titled (tourism studies), is sort of a rapid-fire combination of all of those modes, spun out in a cent...

Low Tide (Eva Kolcze, 2019)

Some films are small, intimate gestures that simply take stock of the world around us, using sound and image to describe natural cycles that tend to elude our perception because they engulf us. Low Tide by Canadian filmmaker Eva Kolcze is a brief but patient accrual of detail around the Toronto Islands. Surrounded by two bodies of water (Lake Ontario and Lake Iroquois), the islands are subject to natural erosion. But the rock formations are...

Geometric Becomings 2 (Manuel DeLanda, 2019)

Manuel DeLanda is a truly odd case. In the late 1970s and throughout the 80s, he was kind of an enfant terrible even within the world of experimental film, making grotty punk films about defacing billboards (Ismism), torturing cockroaches (Judgment Day), or, in his most famous film, combining psychoanalytic tropes, film noir gags, and toilet humor (Raw Nerves: a Lacanian Thriller). Then he mostly abandone...

A Topography of Memory (Burak Çevik, 2019)

The relative clarity of the image above is a bit deceptive. If you actually watch Burak Çevik's new medium-length video piece, one of the main things you'll observe is a visual quality that is significantly degraded compared to what we are accustomed to in most professional art productions. That's because Topography is a half-hour compilation of closed-circuit footage from various wide-angle security cameras stationed throughout the greate...

Aaaaaaaand we're back!

Sorry for the week-long absence. It was (is) the beginning of classes, Matt is starting a new school, and it's just been kind of a madhouse around here. But due dates are fast approaching for the avant-garde film previews, of which these posts are themselves previews, so let's kick it into high gear once more, shall we?