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Where've I Been?
🕑 Added 2022-03-05 06:34:30 +0000 UTC
Well, in addition to being pummeled by grading, the last two weeks have been fairly intense around here, with huge construction projects creating a major racket nonstop. All this to prepare for my son coming back to town for a visit before returning to New Jersey where he's staying for a month or so. So, no peace and quiet, no time to watch anything or write anything. You get the idea.
Sadly, this means I did not get to really produce any coverage of the great Media City Film Festival, which was online form February 8 to March 1. I watched quite a bit of it, but I was hoping to return to several of the films so I could say something specific and meaningful about them. What follows is not that. It's me trying to reconstruct some impressions from my faulty, fading memory. Better than nothing, I suppose.
The Newest Olds (Pablo Mazzolo, 2022)
Mazzolo is one of the best-known experimental filmmakers currently working in Argentina, a nation with a proud and significant history when it comes to avant-garde film. But this is often eclipsed by that country's fruitful new wave of narrative cinema. But there are significant parallels. (If you like Lucrecia Martel and Lisando Alonso, maybe try Narcisa Hirsch and Claudio Caldini!) Mazzolo's recent work could be considered political landscape filmmaking. Using layered, fragmented images, he considers the historical residue that may be perceptible from certain locales -- a project that mirrors Apichatpong's in certain ways.
The Newest Olds leaves the countryside for the city. A follow-up to his 2015 film Fish Point, The Newest Olds takes as its subject the location of the Media City Film Festival itself: Windsor, Ontario and its sister city across the bridge, Detroit. Mazzolo examines the changing skyline of Detroit from close up and far away, using the buildings themselves as totems for that city's shifting fortunes. Stable structures move around, dislodged and unstable, as Windsor looks on, rather helplessly. A site-specific film, The Newest Olds considers its own place within the economy of production and exhibition, refuting the ostensible neutrality of the aesthetic realm.
What Distinguishes the Past (Ben Russell, 2020)
Much like Russell's gorgeous 2015 film YOLO, What Distinguishes the Past makes startlingly poetic use of reverse-motion, as his camera wends its way through a celebration of Belarusian Independence Day, its piercing neons in sharp relief against a cobalt evening sky. There are brief interludes shot in Vilnius, and these sequences create a contrast between a truly free society, Lithuania, and a regime that disguises its true nature through (admittedly seductive) pageantry. As we watch fireworks contract themselves from color bursts back into single-point detonations, we are asked to consider whether or not time always moves in the right direction. Or whether we want it to: What Distinguishes the Past is Russell's memorial tribute to his friend, Jonathan Schwartz, whose own time was tragically cut short.
Kicking the Clouds (Sky Hopinka, 2022)
Following the success of his feature documentary małni—towards the ocean, towards the shore, Ho-Chunk / Luiseño artist Hopinka seems to be exploring a kind of creative restraint. Compared with many of his earlier short films, Kicking the Clouds is a rather straightforward work of nonfiction, focusing on the particular legacies of Luiseño culture through several generations. Using as its basis an audio recording of Hopinka's mother and grandmother speaking the Pechanga language, Kicking the Clouds is a very specific example of a very common story. Hopinka's grandmother was a survivor of the Indian Removal Act, was made to go to white schools, and as a result harbored significant ambivalence about her heritage. His mother, meanwhile, was a proud Pechanga / Luiseño, who wanted to reclaim the language that had been forcibly stripped away.
Using arguments between the two women about their language and culture, and its relative importance to each of them, Hopinka shows us how each generation must negotiate its particular traumas, while inevitably sending that pain down through the family line. The dominant visual refrain in Kicking the Clouds is of Hopinka's mother producing intricate examples of traditional Luiseño beadwork, a meticulous and literal re-weaving of an interrupted cultural legacy.
Triforium (Jayne Parker, 2021)
Previously having only seen one film by U.K. filmmaker Jayne Parker (2019's Amaryllis), I can't really say very much about how her latest film engages with her overall project. But taken on its own terms I found it very well constructed, an architectural study that also serves as a subtle institutional critique. The main subject of Parker's film is the titular triforium, a hidden gallery within Westminster Abbey. "Sixteen meters high above the floor of the nave," as per Parker's notes, the space is notable for its immaculate isolation. Like a finished attic, the triforium is, metaphorically speaking, a storage locker for centuries of rising prayers.
Parker intercuts her shots of the space with other related matter, such as fragments of classical sculpture (unattributed, mostly unseen), an close-ups of magnolias in bloom. In addition to providing the occasional graphic match (the rounded forms circling the windows are inspired by the structure of flowers, for example), they suggest objects seldom seen, or always already shrinking from view -- a wryly British rejoinder to the all-enveloping omnipresence of the Christian god.
2020 (Friedl vom Gröller Kubelka, 2021)
FvGK (who seems to use her former married name somewhat intermittently) is one of the only filmmakers from whom a film about the pandemic is not some sort of ominous threat. That's because her films are models of poetic economy. Usually under three minutes, vom Gröller's works may require intensive preparation -- I really wouldn't know -- but regardless embody an improvisational feel. They come across like diary films but very often involve performative gestures that can entail playful free-spiritedness (Poetry for Sale, 2013) or stark quotidian terror (Me too, too, me too, 2012).
2020 combines these strains, as FvGK takes the lockdown and the pandemic guidance as an opportunity to consider the body's newest danger zone, the nose and mouth. Showing various Austrian citizens in masks, 2020 compares them with women on the bus wearing niqabs (we are all Muslim now . . .), a woman in the dentists' office (hope you're vaccinated . . .), as well as people aggressively baring their unmasked faces, pulling their lips open wide to display their radiant white teeth. Driving the point home, FvGK even throws in the muzzle of a snarling dog. Poking fun at our fear of people without masks while also validating that fear, 2020 actually has something meaningful to express about Covid; it's an abbreviated journal of the plague year.
Notes, Imprints (On Love): Part II, Carmela (Alexandra Cuesta, 2020)
Unlike a lot of folks I know, I was not particularly fond of Cuesta's Notes, Imprints Part I. Every shot was undoubtedly lovely, but I had trouble discerning an underlying structure, even on repeat viewings. Of course, this may be patently unfair; Cuesta puts the word "notes" right there in the title, so it very well may have been desultory by design. By contrast, Part II is a concise portrait film about Cuesta's grandmother. Palpably personal, Part II, Carmela has the ambiance of an old Super-8 home movie, but is edited a bit like a fugue, with alternations of activity and repose, possible loneliness and the close-knit love of family. This film strikes a balance that sounds cliche in the telling but is actually very difficult to really pull off. It finds the universal in the particular.
Missing Time (Morgan Quaintance, 2020)
In recent years British filmmaker Morgan Quaintance has been getting more attention on these shores. Although his aesthetic approach is quite varied, including autobiography, experimental travelogues, and essay films, Quaintance's work is united by a concern with the specific parameters of global blackness. There is a post-colonial sensibility and analysis that runs through these films, and in some ways Missing Time is the most interesting one I've seen. In it, Quaintaince explicitly connects personal and national histories, considering how experiences that run counter to hegemonic logic are misunderstood at best, and most often rendered invisible.
The core of Missing Time relates to the testimonies of Barney and Betty Hill, an interracial couple who claimed to have been abducted by aliens in 1961, the first such story on record. Their story became a TV movie, The UFO Incident, starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons, clips from which appear in Quaintance's film. But the conceptual crux of Missing Time has to do with hypnosis and its temporary period of scientific respectability. They sought help from Dr. Benjamin Simon, a military physician who attempted to heal soldiers' PTSD symptoms with hypnosis. (His work appears in John Huston's Let There By Light.) Quaintance parallels the Hills' "missing time" with the brutality of the British colonial regime in Kenya, a piece of missing history whose traumatic effects were perhaps exacerbated by their lack of recognition.
In its compact fifteen minutes, Missing Time suggests connections between individual and collective memory, but doesn't draw any obvious conclusions. If an apocryphal story about a alien abduction in New Hampshire ultimately gained more cultural traction than the violence and destabilization of Kenya, it perhaps speaks to the West's fixation on individualism and interior psychology. That's to say, it's easier for us to believe in little green men than to acknowledge the nightmare of colonialism, an institutional crime with no single perpetrator.
seeing her (Lindsay McIntyre, 2020)
Seeing her is my first experience with McIntyre, and on a certain level this three-minute silent film is so diminutive and gestural that I suspect its meanings are more resonant when it can echo off of the filmmaker's other works. As is, seeing her is an attentive, materialist film, sort of operating in the space between Sky Hopinka and Jodie Mack. It is a closely lensed, somewhat Cubist examination of an amauti, an Inuit woman's parka that belonged to McIntyre's great-grandmother. The camera lingers over the intricate beadwork, with highlights and reflections emanating from every individual bead. Not so much a still life as a portrait of an object, seeing her is an act of cultural preservation and a work of abstraction connecting the traditional and the modern.
Partial Differential Equation (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2020)
Everson's short films are never without interest, but they can be widely variable. Taken as a whole, they convey a fairly specific project: documenting the people of Black America in their endless individuality. This means that Everson's subjects come from all walks of life, and are most often seen engaged in some personal or professional activity. Partial Differential Equation focuses on Tariah Gatlin, a mathematician who works at Ohio State. Mostly watching her from the back, we see Gatlin for nearly nine minutes writing a massive calculus problem out on a huge chalkboard. The black-and-white film offers some tonal and textural delights, in particular Gatlin's hands, hair, and sweater set off against the deep black of the chalkboard wall. Still, this is a strange choice for a film, since apart from the physical writing of the problem, almost all the labor we're observing is unseen, happening inside Gatlin's head. I suppose this is interesting in itself, since Everson is essentially foregrounding the somewhat uncinematic character of mental labor. This is a film that exists at the margins of what film can feasibly show. But beyond that conceptual sleight of hand, PDE lacks the richness of Everson's other efforts.
Sea Series 23 (John Price, 2022)
Canada's John Price is a sorely underrated filmmaker. In part this has to do with the intensely private character of much of his output. While he isn't a diary filmmaker per se, many of his films consist of brief glimpses of life with his family. The result is a set of everyday moments given the palpability of memory with small optical gestures such as hand-processing, in-camera superimposition, and solarization. His latest, Sea Series 23, was shot on the Yucatán Peninsula, and wide angle shots of the ocean's edge are contrasted with close-ups of his children. In both cases, Price is describing the beach as a cinematic space. But while the long shots result in the abstraction of human figures and the waves, the family scenes -- particularly the images of Price's son buried in the sand by his sister -- provide a direct impression of personal experience, both the filmmaker's and his family's. So despite its modesty of means, Sea Song 23 engages in a filmic dialectic between the aesthetic and the paternal, the disinterested look and the absolute commitment to these people at this unrepeatable time.
Medicine Bundle (Thirza Cuthand, 2020)
Cuthand's work always exhibits a delightfully wry sense of humor, but Medicine Bundle is a bit trickier. At first it suggests that it might be a bit tongue-in-cheek, mostly because of Cuthand's visual deployment of bears. There are so many bears in this film, and in most instances Cuthand has Photoshopped a stock-looking image of a grizzly bear onto a landscape that she herself seems to have shot. But this is actually a somewhat plangent formal maneuver, allowing Cuthand to describe vital people and things that have been lost.
This is a family history story. Cuthand, a member of the Little Pine First Nation, is relating the details of her family's medicine bundle, one which was used in healing ceremonies that saved both her grandfather, and his grandfather before him. The bundle was contained in the hide of a bear cub whose spirit was understood to inhabit the items contained therein. Medicine Bundle is a reflection on Cuthand's relationship with her grandfather, as well as the way in which Native identity is embodied in sacred objects. The bundle has since been buried, so in a way Cuthand's film is a 21st century approximation of that original talisman -- a bundle of sounds and images.
Station II (Michael Hubbard, 2021)
This film was included in Media City's Regional Artists section, and it was a real discovery. Hubbard is a Detroit-based filmmaker working in Super-8, and Station II is composed of nighttime glimpses of a fluorescent light which is then subject to various post-production processes. The striated quality of much of the film suggests that Hubbard was able to separate the colored undertones within the fluorescence, generating a painterly version of Dan Flavin's light-works. Combined with field recordings of the city, Station II opens up the abstraction within the lived environment, creating a bold, polyphonic light field. See this film if you can.
