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Rotterdam 2022: a sampling (part two)
🕑 Added 2022-02-08 20:30:33 +0000 UTC
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Impersonator (Andrew Norman Wilson, 2021)
Wilson is an interesting artist, someone I've yet to really get a bead on. He's produced web-oriented political art (Workers Leaving the Googleplex), funky neo-structuralism (Lavender Town Syndrome), and a mini-narrative playing off a popular rumor about Phil Collins (In the Air Tonight). I've had pretty divergent reactions to them all, but with Impersonator, he seems to be moving further in the direction of In the Air Tonight, but with a more open-ended thematic framework. The protagonist (Gozie Ojini, seen above, who is never witnessed without their "gear") ekes out a marginal life in and around Hollywood, dodging calls from his parents and lurking underneath the L.A. freeways.
Most of the film consists of Steadicam follow-shots as the Impersonator moves through the unseen byways of the Hollywood Hills, trying to avoid cops while making it to his final destination, his working corner, which sadly is already occupied. Wilson creates an atmosphere of mental dissolution, as our antihero pipes recordings of a conspiracy call-in show ("Axis Hollywood") into speakers right inside his helmet. It's a powerful metaphor not only for mental illness but for our general echo-chamber condition. There is no space between the crazy talk and his brain. This disquieting ambiance Wilson generates here often reminded me of Jeff's Wall's work, and that's more than enough for me.
Eami (Paz Encina, 2022)
Winner of this year's Tiger competition, Eami represents an uneasy alliance between ethnographic art cinema and the avant-garde. The plight of murdered and displaced Indigenous peoples has been a favored topic in Latin / South American cinema in recent years, and with good reason. As these marginalized groups have come forward, demanding governmental redress for the genocidal actions taken against them by the colonial powers, the backlash against them has been virulent. (The 2019 coup against the socialists in Bolivia, for example, was in part a revolt against increasing Indigenous participation in government.) Still, it's never quite clear what films like Ixcanul or Embrace of the Serpent really accomplish for their subjects.
Encina takes a very different tack, and as I suggest above, it is intermittently successful. Avoiding the display of overt violence, Eami plays instead like a tone poem of collective trauma. As the Ayoreo people are forcibly ejected from their forest home by the "coñones" ("the insensitive ones"), we hear short testimonios from members of the tribe, detailing their experiences. However most of the film centers on one young girl named Eami (Anel Picanerai), whose understanding of the invasion is fragmentary, befitting a child. She is more concerned with finding her best friend than evacuating the forest.
This approach, obviously, allows Encina to dramatize an event that is both collective and disorienting, a trauma distributed among various people who, to judge from Eami, do not share the Western conception of the individual subject. Rather, they understand themselves as coextensive with their forest environment, and so their ejection resonates like a kind of death. But Encina works to make this a bit more explicit than it needs to be. The Ayoreo call their land "eami," which translates as both "the forest" and "the world." So Eami, the character, serves as a fairly obvious metonym for the Ayoreo people; what befalls her befalls all of them, directly or indirectly. This kind of forced symbolism suggests that Encina made a film about a civilization she could not fully understand, or that making a truly anti-subjective film requires a new language we've yet to develop.
NOTE: I have been a bit distracted, so I failed to note in the write-up above that the first shot of Eami, lasting around eight minutes and introducing a stunning micro-climate of tones and atmosphere, actually rivals the opening sequence in Silent Light. No, really.
The African Desperate (Martine Syms, 2022)
From its title, a pun on "African diaspora," to its jaundiced look at liberal arts MFA programs, The African Desperate is a satire so specific that it feels like a sharp pain in the gut for those of us familiar with this milieu. Syms' debut feature covers an incredibly short narrative timeline, from main character Palace (Diamond Stingily) passing her painfully awkward Master's exam, through a night of drug-fueled disorientation, to the next morning as Palace catches a train back to Chicago. This compression mostly works in the film's favor since it makes the political stakes of race and sex feel more lived-in and casual. This means that when a professor asks Palace a blatantly racist question, Syms calls it out but also lets in hang in the air, suggesting that such offenses, inexcusable though they may be, are just another day at the office for a young Black woman in the mostly-white art world.
All that having been said, there's a limit to what such intense specificity can accomplish, and by the final third of the film (especially the endless MFA party and accompanying drug trip), Syms seems to run out of steam. She is correct to bet most of her chips on Stingily's charisma and subtle comic timing. And, by depicting Palace's willingness to mobilize racial difference when backed into emotional corners she can't navigate, Syms makes a bold choice. Palace's neuroses are fitting for someone her age, highly successful (she was invited to the Venice Biennale as a grad student) but constantly dealing with mixed messages from jealous (and non-Black) members of her cohort.
In most respects, The African Desperate plays like a post-collegiate comedy of identity in flux, and by focusing on Palace, Syms is able to highlight a range of caucasity among Palace's peers. The film makes boho white privilege strange, showing how various characters fetishize Palace because she seems to have a much stronger sense of self than they do. So drama queen Portia (Ruby McCollister) exaggeratedly professes her love and admiration for Palace; gay bestie Liam (Brent David Freaney) relies on her as a moral touchpoint; Fern (Erin Meuchner) positions her as the hated rival; and so on.
In other words, white people keep trying to make Palace a supporting player in her own life, the same way that most mainstream white films construct the "Sassy Black Friend." Syms and Stingily flip the script, showing Palace's annoyance and exhaustion at the thoughtless misogynoir of the funky-art-kid set.
