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Submitted for Your Approval, #3: Alfred (Esther Urlus, 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-06-12 19:01:32 +0000 UTCUpon having a look at Esther Urlus' latest film, my friend Darren Hughes asked me why her work isn't programmed more regularly in North American experimental film showcases. I'm not exactly sure. I first discovered her work while reviewing a group of avant-garde shorts for the Nashville Film Festival over ten years ago, and have made it a point to keep tabs on her output ever since. If I had to guess as to why she's not better known on these shores, I'd offer this two-part hypothesis. First, she is Dutch, and the Netherlands has not typically been thought of as a hotbed of experimental film activity, at least not since the days of Bert Haanstra in the early 60s. Second, Urlus is a perfectionist but not exactly a frame-buster. She makes exquisite, consistently engaging films, but they do exist well within the genre parameters of what we understand "experimental film" to be.
Take her latest, for example. Alfred is a short, colorful motion study comprised of superimposed close-ups of a pigeon flapping its wings. As Urlus explains in her notes on the film, Alfred was an abandoned baby pigeon she and her daughter rescued and raised, and the film was shot as a souvenir of their time with him, just prior to setting him free to live as he was meant to. What you see as you watch Alfred is a series of film passages that function as a spatial "play," with an organic object moving around and bristling against the strictures of its geometrical container -- a bird inside a frame. Urlus uses positive and negative images, and various color separation techniques, to render the scene in contrasting hues of pastel and/or saturation, and the result is a study in theme and variation that calls to mind the work of Malcolm LeGrice (Berlin Horse) or even a more lyrical Paul Sharits.
As such, there is nothing particularly surprising about Alfred. It articulates a set of parameters and explores them, with a deft control of rhythm and shot-to-shot contrast. In its engagement with known methods of formalist imagemaking, Urlus' film recalls certain recent avant-garde practices in France, such as the films of Olivier Fouchard, Mahine Rouhi, or Frédérique Devaux. Like those artists, Urlus uses experimental techniques expressively, not as a way to necessarily challenge our modes of seeing but to capture fleeting impressions of the ordinary world that resist narrativization. That's to say, while some avant-gardists are intent on being Cézanne or Schoenberg, she is more than happy to be Matisse or Debussy. That joyful, experiential mode of avant-garde is too often in short supply, and we should embrace it when it comes our way.
