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This Action Lies (James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2018)
🕑 Added 2019-08-30 00:06:22 +0000 UTC
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, The Republic, had no images at all, and was essentially a radio play delivered by other means.)
In his unique interest in textual concerns, Kienitz Wilkins and his work prompt certain inevitable comparisons to Hollis Frampton, and This Action Lies functions a bit like a hybrid of (nostalgia) and Lemon, which sounds utterly paradoxical but works quite beautifully. Kienitz Wilkins delivers a one-hour monologue that hovers around autobiography, although there are enough discursive reversals and curlicues to complicate any simple acceptance of that authorial act of faith. A speaker calling himself "James N. Kienitz Wilkins" describes the process of making the piece, and spins off from there into a number of factual and historical digressions.
Throughout the film, we are shown a single Styrofoam cup of coffee (or so the editing would have us believe) on a Doric column, lighted from one of three possible angles. Kienitz Wilkins tells us about the company that manufactured the cup, delivers a brief history of Dunkin' Donuts, and explains how brands that come to typify their product in the marketplace (Xerox, Kleenex, Styrofoam) are at risk of losing their trademark. He also couples these observations with the struggles of being a new father, which represents a different kind of potential identity loss.
This Action Lies never explains its title, but it seems somehow evident that Kienitz Wilkins is referring to the conceptual process of making a film in this vein. It purports to expose its own procedures, but of course it can never really do so. But more than this, the film has two tracks of information that run almost entirely separately. The filmmaker's monologue is intended to sound somewhat extemporaneous ("hot"), although we know it is well-rehearsed ("cold"). Likewise, the image of the coffee suggests that the film somehow contains thermal energy, a picture of heat. But the beverage was cold long before Kienitz Wilkins even finished filming. We impute heat to the coffee, just as we imbue the "dead" actors onscreen with life.
So with the title of his film, Kienitz Wilkins is revealing a basic cinematic truth. If we want to lie to ourselves anyway, hey. Fuckin' gonuts.
