Three recent short films by Bob Goldberg are centered on his compositions for his ensemble of five accordion players, and the films present different approaches to how to combine images with music. In Some Regular Trees, a 9 minute short, we first hear the main melodic theme, a slowly meandering melody using an invented mode that has a vaguely Middle Eastern sound to it, played by the entire ensemble in unison. This melody and variations on it form the basic musical material for the piece. At times the players perform it in a canon, but more often in some form of heterophony, where players deliberately play a tune moving in and out of phase with one another and with individual ornamentation, creating an impression of a melody that constantly blurs and comes back together.

The visual layer of Some Regular Trees shows us the individual accordionists playing their parts among trees. Behind them we can see complex patterns of more treetops and branches, composited into overlapping visual layers. The effect of the visuals is highly analogous to the musical structure. The layers of tree branches moving in and out of phase with one another mirror the overlapping versions of the main melody. Goldberg combines these visual layers into hypnotic, mesmerizing patterns, at once soothing and stimulating. Overall, the visual elements are subordinate to the music: they provide a place for the eye to rest while taking in the musical counterpoint, and their shifting patterns help us to immerse ourselves deeply in what we are listening to.

In a forest, we see many variations on oak, on maple, on pine. Each oak tree sings the same tune, but with its own history, its own trajectory. Goldberg’s variations on a theme gives us a similar idea in music. The members of the ensemble, each attuned to the same melodic material, create grand and shifting textures and moods, constantly blurring and coming back into focus.

Share

A companion piece, Some More Regular Trees, explores further variations on the same musical and visual material. Here, Goldberg exploits the fact that his melodic mode uses the same 4 intervals while moving progressively up into harmonically distant tonal centers. He allows the melodies to drift much further apart, creating dense clouds of dissonance. The visual layers here, too, are denser, often showing multiple images of the same musician layered on top of one another. We’re getting deeper into the woods here.

In Squeeze and Be Squeezed/Trees Song, 8 minutes, the visual elements are much more in the foreground. Goldberg’s camera focuses directly on the body of his Enrico Roselli accordion. a beautiful instrument, with diamond patterns on the pleated bellows and fancy, inlaid detailing. Reflecting the bellows in vertical symmetry, it is like looking at a pair of beautiful, mechanical lungs, as the instrument literally breathes in and out. Again layering multiple out of sync copies of the footage and highlighting the pleats with a glow effect, the imagery quickly becomes quite abstract, a forest of incandescent vertical stripes, slowly pulsing in and out.

The music, mainly long, sustained tones, slowly shifts from one chord to another. Gradually, the drone becomes a song, with lyrics proclaiming that “mighty, like the forest, we are free.” The accordion pleats fade into blossoms, leaves, and some more regular trees. Trees breathe. We breathe. Accordions breathe. As Goldberg observes in an overlaid text, “We’ve come here, all from different places, scattered like the petals on the breeze.” We might be from different places, but we’re all in this thing together. These beautiful collages of music and images serve to make that audible and visible.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Por Dinero is an engaging portrait of an indigenous family in the remote town of Panixtlahuaca in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the young son who supports them with his dishwashing job in Florida. This experimental documentary by Brendan and Jeremy Smyth uses a collage technique to convey the relaxed pace of life among Chatino-speaking people in this country town, where very hard work is interspersed with play, conversation, and a simple enjoyment of the beautiful mountainous place where they live. We see family members cutting crops with a machete, slaughtering a rooster, washing clothes, and just sitting quietly. The unhurried flow of time in Panixtlahuaca is captured by the film’s editing rhythms, where slow, calm panning shots are punctuated by the occasional drama of a thunderstorm.

Through voice-over interviews, translated from Chatino, we learn that the 20 year old son Israel has been able to support his entire family through his restaurant job in Florida, generously raising their standard of living. His job is considered a bottom end job in the USA, so this is a striking example of the difference in the cost of living between the two countries. Both Israel and his family speak of the pain caused by the separation, but it is an unavoidable necessity.

Israel’s sister explains that she is trying to learn Spanish because she aspires to become a nurse. Learning Spanish is a key to overcoming Mexican prejudice against indigenous people and moving into the larger society, but she still feels a keen appreciation for her Chatino language and traditions. She doesn’t have enough money for nursing school, however. Israel’s income keeps the family comfortably fed, but it isn’t enough to do more for them.

Share

Florida must seem strange and surreal to Israel, and the Smyth’s convey this by using black and white footage, while the footage from Panixtlahuaca is in the full color which represents “real life.” The Florida footage is also more manipulated: sequences of chaotic single frames and extreme close-ups on parts of Israel’s face indicate a place where life feels fragmented and incoherent. By contrast, the relaxed scenes of ordinary life in Mexico, in which Israel’s family members are generally smiling to themselves with unselfconscious pleasure, reveal a life that is both coherent and meaningful.

The film is also threaded with quotes about the mythical Mayan hero Canek, from a poetic text by Ermilo Abereu Gomez. These fragmentary bits of surreal, supernatural drama form a clear parallel with the mythic, heroic character that Israel has for his family, and the drama of his journey into an unknown realm on their behalf.

The Mexican footage has the informal feeling of “edited in the camera” diary films. The filmmakers casually capture whatever seems particularly visually arresting to them, although with a practiced and sensitive eye. The soundtrack, by contrast, is a carefully constructed collage of ambient sounds such as wind and dogs barking, local musicians, interviews with the subjects, and excerpts from the Canek text. The careful layering of the sound serves to bind the flow of the film into a crafted, organic experience.

Por Dinero is an unusual documentary that is able to mix the poetic, the mythic, and the quotidian to portray the complex economic relationship between an immigrant to the USA and his family in a way that brings the shocking experience of cultural dislocation vividly to life.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

The Strange Disappearance of Emily Jayne, a half hour drama by Steven Adam Renkovish, centers on the title character (Brittany Renée), a young woman who lives alone in a small town in the American South, haunted by memories of her lover Annabel (Shelby Willis), who died of cancer. Emily Jayne is a practicing witch, and on Halloween night, the Wiccan holiday Samhain, when “the veil is thinnest” between the worlds of the living and the dead, she embarks on a ritual, determined to come in contact with her deceased lover. Renkovish’s grainy Super 8 footage, both color and black and white, lends a shimmering, mysterious tone to the film.

A scene where she is visited by proselytizing Christian evangelical neighbors, seemingly there to scold her for her lesbian wickedness, leaves her unfazed, and she appears quite comfortable with who she is. In an interesting detail, one young woman with the Christian group, apparently a closeted lesbian, exchanges a secret and friendly glance of complicity with her. Later on Emily Jayne angrily destroys the material the visitors had given her, and is dismayed to see her front door disfigured by vandals. Evidently, she’s more unsettled by her neighbors’ hostility than we first thought.

Repeated flashback montages of her previous life with Annabel show the careful, loving way that the two women took care of one another. While it is true that these sequences consist almost entirely of movie clichés about how to depict people in love, they still serve to help us understand Emily Jayne’s character, her bravery, her steadfast devotion to Annabel’s memory, her loving nature.

Emily Jayne’s Samhain ritual is accomplished with the aid of a psychedelic herb, and the film’s most visually adventurous section gives us a sense of her psychic journey to the underworld, in search of her Eurydice, utilizing deeply saturated colors, flicker effects, and kaleidoscopic reflections.

Share

The film’s title, of course, telegraphs in advance what will happen. Along the way, Renkovish tells this timeless Orphic tale with a sweet, homemade simplicity that is captivating. In the program notes, he describes the cast and crew as his “film family,” and the handheld shots, home movie small gauge format and the small town setting all give the film the sense of a highly personal project created with love and care. It’s a true art film, a lovely example of the tradition of personal cinema.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

She Learns to Lunge, a new short video poem by Katya Yakubov, is a delicate and exquisitely wrought collage of words, images, and ambient sounds. The video is open-ended enough to invite multiple interpretations, yet the text and the images clearly speak of a young woman’s intuitive search for identity and cultural roots. Neither the images nor the sounds directly illustrate the poem (read by Yakubov on the soundtrack), but rather they expand on the ideas and feelings which are hinted at in the poem.

The language of the poem is concise and expressive. Writing of the ancient, traditional voices that are struggling to come alive with her, Yakubov says “Where else will her short legs grow longer, except shackled to my porous bones?” Later in the video, we see multiple images of the young woman, looking at herself in the bathroom mirror. At first, she is dressed in a contemporary t-shirt, but then she is replaced by a version of herself wearing a much more traditional looking blouse. (The blouse looks Russian, like Yakubov.) Finally, we see an older, Peruvian Indian woman wearing the blouse while standing in the shower, but she quickly disappears by closing the curtain. (This might be the most poetic use of a bathroom setting I’ve seen in a film.)

Share

In another sequence, the young woman removes a series of shirts she is wearing, one by one. This is clearly an image of a search through layers of identity for the inner, more authentic voice. The poem speaks of the inner self “ballooning her mighty wings,” and a series of cabinet doors and drawers magically fly open in a kitchen. A new self is coming out.

Yakubov has an extremely precise way of layering evocative images and sounds with poetic text, and a sure sense of rhythm and composition. She brings all of these elements together in a beautiful form, which speaks in a quiet but assured voice about the need to connect with ancient traditions.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Zersetzung [Decomposition], a largely abstract 3 minute short by Michael Betancourt, is absorbing and beautiful. The film begins with a rather romantic illustration of a house hidden in a forest, on top of a mountain peak covered with lavender mist, but this image almost immediately falls apart into a pattern of of dots and smeary patches of color. The visual compositions continuously morph, stretch, and compress, smoothly re-forming into patterns of blocks, blotches, and bumpy textures, hot and cool colors mixing in highly activated spaces. The organic feeling of the transformations, almost like the images are breathing in and out, is like watching colonies of microorganisms growing and changing. Occasionally, we see forms which resemble a face, a turning figure, a street, but these moments of recognizable shapes immediately melt again into flows of color. The music consists of interlocking layers of looped melody, playing against one another in patterns which go in and out of phase.

Betancourt made the film by exploiting “AI glitches,” a technique of disrupting the normal workings of image-generating AI models by feeding them contradictory data, forcing them to generate increasingly abstract material. Many filmmakers have been using AI techniques such as Latent Space Interpolation to create sequences which resemble the kinds of hypnogogic “eyelid movies” we see when we are falling asleep. When we close our eyes, our brains ceaselessly combine forms and colors, trying to make temporary sense out of the patterns which emerge from the visual churning of our half-sleeping brains. Betancourt’s technique has a similar structure, but in a more abstract style. The chain of visual associations the model seems to follow are largely based on abstract, visual values of texture, composition, tension and contrast, in other words, the same criteria that abstract artists use, but without their purpose and direction, their sense of preference and taste. The music, also generated with AI tools, has a similar quality. We hear musical variation after variation, but with no internal musical logic, structure, direction, or expressive intent. It is literally mindless music.

Share

AI videos often catch our attention, for a short while, because they closely resemble our own inner landscapes, the kind of low-energy visual muttering we see in a liminal state. By keeping his video so short, Betancourt allows us to glide on the shimmering surface of the transformations, enjoying and almost surprised by the constant shifts of space and texture. In a longer format, we might quickly tire of the mindless, aimless quality of the shifting, but as it is it remains a refreshing bath in the brain-tickling visual turns and twists.

Betancourt’s written film description draws a complex parallel between the corrosive effect of AI on human consciousness and the deliberately confusing, destabilizing psychological techniques employed by secret police in fascist societies to disable political dissidents, all of which is interesting, but not something I was able to see in the film itself. Yet these thoughts remain latent in the way I felt after the film was over. As Betancourt wrote to me in an email, the film’s music “isn’t really music, but an audio file that imitates music.” The images look like expressive works of abstract art but they have an inner emptiness that leaves one faintly baffled by their lack of substance. It’s like eating a meal of junk food: it may seem good, even addictively delicious, but there’s no nourishment. As an abstract study of changing colors and forms, Zersetzung is enjoyable but exceedingly lightweight. But the meta statement that surrounds Betancourt’s film is weighty indeed, full of portents of the coming technological upheavals.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

When I Stop Looking is a complex, deeply engaging short by Todd Herman with a seemingly straight-forward structure: it simply shows us the faces of people facing the camera. But these aren’t ordinary faces. The people in the film all have conditions which make their skin and facial structure abnormal, in some cases very abnormal. In many shots their eyes are closed, but a few look directly at the camera. They are mostly shown singly, but in a few shots two people lean together, embrace, or even kiss, but without very much movement. There only sound for the film is “room tone,” the barely audible ambient sound which filmmakers usually use to fill in spots between dialog.

What must it be like to live with such a condition? Some of the people in the film have faces that, in commercial films, would be used to symbolize the monstrous and the alien. To go through an entire life knowing that every person who sees you is struggling with their own fear and repulsion must be very, very hard.

Share

Herman’s fascinating approach to this subject forces us into a voyeuristic relationship. A more conventional documentary would no doubt seek to “humanize” the subjects by using interviews and shots of daily life. We would learn that Mary is concerned about global warming, while Frank loves basketball. Herman’s approach makes the subjects even more radically human by putting our focus relentlessly on what must be a central fact of their lives: the daily confrontation with their own and other people’s response to their unusual appearance. At the same time, because it is a film and not a live performance, we become aware of our own guilty need to stare at them. The film is slow and simple enough to give us time to feel the full complexity of our response.

Herman has found over 25 such people to depict. I have lived for over 50 years in a densely populated urban area and I’ve only seen people who look like this once or twice, so they must live very private lives, an entirely understandable choice. When I Stop Looking creates a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between us and them, by taking these hidden lives and making them simply, humanly visible for a few moments.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

•Choose a few works which you’d like me to see, and send me the links and passwords. Please don’t send me links to a page on your website or Vimeo page where a large number of films are available.

•I write about single channel works made on video or film, intended for theatrical screening or home viewing. I don’t generally write about installation or gallery pieces, or performances of “expanded cinema.”

•It’s helpful if you can send a synopsis, biography, any relevant press material, and stills from the film.

•It may take a very long time before I have a chance to view your film, and decide whether or not I will write about it, so I apologize in advance for that.

•Please email queries to lakeivan@substack.com

•I will respond and let you know whether and when I will be publishing an article about your film. If I choose not to write about it, I can still share my impressions of the film with you, if you like.

•Friends with a filmmaker? Please pass this information on. Thanks.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

In Eudora, filmmaker Michael Bucuzzo uses visual tropes from horror films to explore the “haunted” nature of artifacts from his grandfather’s life and home. He creates a powerful, somewhat abstract study of the uncanny way that old personal belongings can colonize our imaginations. Eudora uses shaky, hand-held shots from low angles, night scenes lit by swerving flashlights, and a soundscape of ominously amplified household sounds such as ticking clocks, all devices familiar from horror films, but he uses them not to titillate and scare the viewer, but to evoke the haunted sense which accompanies all old, family things. Many younger artists, recently out of film school, use film clichés simply to make empty, film-obsessed style exercises, recreating genre stylistic tics for their own sake, but Eudora is much more personal and expressive. Bucuzzo lights the scenes gorgeously, and he has a wonderful ear for mixing arresting collages of sounds. His editing rhythms and compositional skills ensure that the film speaks with an authentic, highly specific artistic voice.

Share

From seemingly simple images, such as a slow pan over a blue tarp covered with leaves, accompanied by the tolling of a bell, Bucuzzo creates a sense of mystery and fear. In the case of this particular image of the tarp, we also see in the foreground a mysterious object which might be an ancient mound or pyramid, and this permanently unsettles the image. Another lurid example: a door swings open to barely the reveal a rocking horse, while we hear the scratches from the end part of a 78rpm record. The simple swinging of the door creates a feeling which is literally unhinged. Ordinary objects which might have belonged to the grandfather, such as clocks, books, and lamps, are luridly lit, as the camera pans from a low, paranoid angle. Bucuzzo also animates some of the objects and the lights, which creates a distinct “haunted house” feeling. The grandfather, in turn, seems haunted by war memories, which Bucuzzo evokes through stylized representations of trench warfare. With his artful and subtle way of placing together precisely framed images and sounds, Bucuzzo creates a world where everyday things bristle with menace.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

In Hansel and Gretel Get Kicked Out, a new 12 minute short by Mille Feuille, you won’t see any overt references to the Grimm fairy tale. The film alternates between security cam footage from retail stores, showing teenage thieves breaking in and taking stuff, with on-screen text quotes from teen bloggers, talking about abusive homes, where their parents kicked them out, or sometimes they simply had to run away in order to be safe. The security cam footage plays on the low rez, low frame rate quality, often framed is if we are peering through binoculars, emphasizing a quality of mechanized surveillance, a watchful but impersonal authority that, far from replacing the loving guidance of concerned parents, instead tries to categorize and contain theft as merely one of costs of running a business.

The quotes presented describe inflection points in the domestic dramas that lead to teen homelessness. “My mother raised her hand hard to slap me, and I held her hand and I threw it down.” In the original video blogs these quotes are taken from, these stories may have been told in the dramatic style which characterized the “storytime” blogging genre at its height, but here, presented in a sans serif font tinted a cool blue, these dramatic moments become symptoms, examples of a larger social breakdown. We don’t read any one kid’s full story; we read descriptions of multiple instances of disappointment, of resentment, of fear. Of parents who have little interest in helping their kids sort out the complexities of growing up, and just want them gone, so they won’t have to think about them any more. Of kids suddenly finding themselves living as outcasts, completely responsible for their own survival, having to rely on their own cunning and daring to provide for every physical and emotional need.

Share

The break-in footage is more overtly dramatic, with kids smashing through plate glass windows, doors and display cases, grabbing handfuls of jewelry, clothing, electronics. Occasionally fighting with security guards. The urgency of having to move quickly, presumably while deafening alarms are sounding, lends a feeling of wild desperation to the scenes. It’s an astonishing display of youthful rage, neediness, daring.

The fairy tale referenced in the title may not appear overtly on screen, but the context provided by the title informs every frame. This tale of a stepmother who is tired of worrying about feeding her kids and plots to abandon them in the woods evokes the forlorn, dependent powerlessness of childhood. Hansel and Gretel are forced to rely on their wits to find their way out of their predicament, sometimes with disastrous consequences, something every runaway or disowned kid understands. On their blogs, they try to leave a trail of narrative breadcrumbs, hopefully weaving their catastrophic lives into a form of entertainment and fame, but as these video crumbs get gobbled up by their fans, they fail to lead them back home to a loving woodsman father.

Mille Feuille’s found footage films have a unique way of injecting myth and fairy tale into the online artifacts of contemporary trauma. In Hansel and Gretel Get Kicked Out, the fairy tale reference provides a very old emotional underpinning to the conflict we see in the crumbling family structures of today. Living in a world where both social norms and economic safety nets are vanishing, both parents and kids are having a rough time of it, but it is still up to the adults to find some way out of the mess. When they abdicate this responsibility, and disavow their duty to love, protect and guide their kids, the result of the betrayal is a spectacular outpouring of anger.

The film, as presented, has a complex relation to the reality of teenage crime. Runaway kids and homeless kids may be a small percentage of all teenage criminals, but the vast majority of kids living on the street do steal, because they have no other way to survive. What they share with the larger group of kids who steal, some of them materially well off, is emotional hunger, a gnawing inner emptiness, a space left vacant by all the caring, thoughtful adults they wish were there, watching out for them. They share a fury, an inchoate sense that something which is their birthright has been stolen from them, and a determination to fill the void by any means necessary. We see them scooping up plush toys by the handful, as if they could scoop up the happy childhood they never had and take it with them.

Mille Feuille’s films aren’t documentaries; they have no responsibility to present sociological facts. Her films are radical acts of poetry, what Frank O’Hara referred to as “meditations in an emergency.” They dwell on the emotional undercurrents which pulse underneath online content, the conflicts, fears and anger which show their traces all over the internet. She uses myth and fairy tales as the only reliable guides through this confusing and tumultuous outpouring we know as the world wide web. The old tales never die, they simply reappear in every age, wearing a new costume. Mille Feuille’s special gift is a discerning eye, the ability to spot fragments of online video which are bristling with implied meanings, and the alchemical art of reassembling these fragments into contemporary fables, not fables that teach us morals; fables that reveal the absence of morals. The web is full of wicked witches, displaying tantalizingly delicious gingerbread houses, but one had best exercise caution before one smashes through the candy glass windows and reaches inside to grab a handful of treats.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Another Song About the Sea is Jeremy Bessoff’s haunting, exquisite animated study of a couple whose relationship is effected by the husband’s deep depression. The story is told, without spoken dialog, in a series of metaphorical poetic vignettes, very loosely inspired by a 1930 deep sea dive conducted by William Beebe, who used a tank to discover a previously unknown world of bioluminescent creatures. Here, diving into the depths is a metaphor for plunging into the subconscious sea of powerful emotions. In the case of the husband William, the sea is paralyzing sadness and isolation, whereas the wife Gloria discovers a world of beauty and freedom, and in her dives she finds a shipwreck with sunken treasure, presided over by goddess figurines. The treasure enables her to transform herself into a gloriously swimming mermaid.

Share

Bessoff’s stop-motion animation technique is based on puppet theater. Every set piece, prop, costume, and puppet in the film is made from simple materials such as rope, wood, and papier-mâché. (Part of the film’s considerable artistic pleasure consists of enjoying how beautiful these handmade objects are.) The film opens with an overtly theatrical prolog, in which two goddess figurines in front of a curtain are dramatically lit from the side and then slowly slide apart, one of them towards the light and one of them away, all to fabulous orchestral music by Keith Kusterer. The curtain rises, and we see William and Gloria sitting at opposite ends of their breakfast table. The whole film proceeds like a puppet play one might perform in a living room, except that the motion of the objects is created by stop-motion animation rather than by puppeteers, allowing for much more complex movement. The use of changing camera angles and Foley sound effects marks the style as distinctly cinematic, and not simply a document of a puppet show, yet Bessoff retains the special magic and power of puppet performance, where ordinary materials are given a breath of life and the ability to tell stories. In particular, the fact that Bessoff uses no facial animation allows the figures of William and Gloria to achieve the saturated, concentrated expressiveness of puppets, where the distilled essence of the character is embodied in the unmoving face.

Bessoff has invented a series of sparse, densely evocative scenes for the film, in which the images speak eloquently of the emotional distance separating the characters. The setting switches back and forth freely between the external world of the breakfast table, where the characters barely see or acknowledge one another, and the interior landscape of the deep sea dive off of a boat, where the couple seemingly cooperate as explorers. An image where William is caught in a fishing net, deep in the black interior of the tank, while he looks through a porthole at mermaid Gloria, creates an indelible image of a couple separated by depression. But the mermaid, in the limitless freedom of the sea, still feels imprisoned, since she longs for contact with her husband. In another powerful metaphor, Gloria seals William into the tank in preparation for the dive. She tightens the bolts by hitting a wrench with a hammer, tenderly trying to ensure that he will be safe. But the banging causes an intolerable resonance inside the tank, sending William into an agony of pain. In a close relationship, even the most solicitous offer of help can hurt the other person. Another Song About the Sea is full of these kinds of powerful, metaphoric scenarios.

The pacing of the film, unlike most animated films, is quite slow and meditative, allowing the resonance of the emotional metaphors to have their impact. The style is rather like a Bergman film, and it is a revelation to see how well this kind of detailed, slow meditation on a relationship can be expressed with animation, without having to rely on the fast-paced cute transformations which dominate most cartoons. Ultimately, puppets excel at depicting characters who feel helpless as they struggle against overwhelming forces, and so they provide a perfect way to tell this story of a couple struggling to avoid being engulfed.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

El Vergonzoso, the first feature length film by Joshua Dean Tuthill, is masterful. The film immerses us in a strange, stark landscape of subjugation, violence, and confusion, using a seamless blend of stop motion puppet animation and computer-generated landscapes to create breathtaking panoramas, enigmatic moments of pain and beauty that point towards our world’s infatuation with authoritarianism.

The film takes place in a mythical land, something like Spain under Franco or Chile under Pinochet, ruled by a fascist dictatorship of pigs. The images are allegorical depictions from the adventures of an ordinary man who dreams of resisting the dictatorship, but ends up being used and discarded by it.

The prologue of the film shows an old-fashioned TV set on a table. Through a window behind the table we see a storm raging outside. The screen flashes a variety of ads and footage of protests, riots, police firing bullets at crowds. We hear Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s voice, issuing from a figure with a cow’s head, saying “all those riots are causing my life to be miserable,” a sentiment which could serve as the film’s motto for its examination of the problematic nature of political violence.

Suddenly, we are transported to a kind of ceremonial room inside a grand palace. A large sculpture depicts a factory, pipes extending underneath it into the mouths of two hapless looking gentlemen. Apparently the poison gas they’re being forced to inhale is being expelled from their buttholes, which are affixed to pipes opening up into musical horns, emitting an ominous musical ostinato. This bizarre tableau, symbolizing a power structure in which manufactured toxicity emits the cloud of malaise and discontent which keeps the structure from tumbling, establishes most of the iconic imagery which will be used in the strange universe of the film. Tuthill’s way of ritualizing and sexualizing complex power structures by turning them into sculptural objects is remarkable, akin in some ways to Matthew Barney’s.

Tuthill’s ability to create breathtaking visual compositions, surreal landscapes that disturb you as they overwhelm you with their strange beauty, is the key which anchors the film. Almost any frame in the film presents an arresting, otherworldly tableau. Like Parajanov, Tuthill structures the film as a series of moving surrealist paintings which tell the hidden story of the film in oblique, poetic terms. The film itself is a slow ceremony, an incantation of horror at a closed system of violence and control.

The film unfolds by presenting a series of such tableaux, filled with slow, ritualized actions of violence and suffering, full of portents and signs, suggestive of the film’s themes and stories rather than overt. Reading between the lines, we gradually pick up a story of sorts, a story of a man who, like Winston Smith in 1984, struggles against an overwhelmingly powerful system that seems to have perfected the art of mind control.

Within the film’s opening section we witness many such tableaux. A man lies in bed masturbating under a blanket while a hideous giant nanny goat with a human face grins at him through the window. In a corner of a palace, a man wearing a gold mask and lacy underwear points his rifle at a white goat. The scenes unfold as in a disturbing dream.

In the perverse world of El Vergonzoso the master/slave relations of a fascist society are played out in elaborate sexual rituals. A man, dressing himself up in a frock coat like an aristocrat and wearing a pig mask, ceremonially rapes a woman, also in a pig mask. As in Pasolini’s Salò, the power relations of fascism are universally libidinized. Both rulers and the ruled are turned on by the arrangement, their perverse desires perpetuating the dominance. Tuthill emphasizes the piggishness of the pigs: they seek pure gratification at all times. Peasants dress up as piglets, aping their masters. Another man, apparently an ancien régime aristocrat, witnesses their degradation, and makes a show of being “shocked” and vomiting in response to their depravity. Thanks to his ceremonial display of his refinement and sensitivity, he is crowned with laurels, earning the right to rule over others. Slowly, ceremoniously, the faux piglets applaud him. In the ritual’s final moment, a frock-coated pig, a real pig, shoots the man, to more applause. Thus, the sacred rite of the fascist coup is reenacted and blessed.

The hapless man we are watching, the film’s beleaguered anti-hero, has a look of perpetual surprise and bewilderment. The system of punishment and reward is so cunningly devised that the people here are continually running from the addictive rush of the TV to being raped or beaten, never knowing where or why the next blow will fall. Their confusion serves to disarm them, and so, to steady themselves, they pick up their rifles, aiming out the window at something, anything, little suspecting who’s hand is even now reaching for their own internal trigger.

The story of this man and his sacrifice by the regime which forms the core of the film has the ceremonial, preordained quality of a ritual. The ritual is presided over by two goats, ambiguous deities and wordless narrators who see that the victim is properly prepared for his role as scapegoat. A serene, distant white nanny goat, at times a nurturing mother figure who literally suckles the man, at times a distant beacon guiding him from her perch on a snowy mountain peak, pointing him towards his violent destiny. The film’s other spirit guide is a man with the head of a billy goat, dressed in a snakeskin suit and playing mournful music on his electric guitar. The music, amplified with multiple delays, is like a series of sad flamenco riffs. Chimeric gods, ersatz figures of Baphomet or Anubis, also roam the landscape, ironic deities of this imprisoning regime.

Periodically, we read fragments of text, taken from Goya’s sketches, floating over the landscape. While we watch the hero swaying in a cornfield, we read, in Spanish and English, “To go amongst the branches.” These titles reflect the film’s themes obliquely and poetically, just as they do in Goya’s prints. Goya’s spirit of irony, of the dark comedy of poverty and war, permeates the film.

Share

The everyman hero appears in multiple versions, sometimes co-existing in the same room. There is a “wild man” version of the hero, unkempt hair and beard growing freely, whom we periodically see naked out in the cornfields, howling like a wolf, longing for his previous free and wild life. We also see him in his apartment, sitting utterly mesmerized by the TV. On the screen, he watches a brutal wrestling match between two men with black boar heads, seemingly palace guards or secret police. As they systematically violate every known rule of wrestling, kicking each other’s balls and smashing one another with furniture, the wild man stares in helpless fascination, held captive by images of violence he secretly dreams of committing.

We also meet a cleaned-up version of the man who seems to be training himself for a rebellious act of violence.We see him performing stretches and calisthenics, as well as practicing his marksmanship with his rifle, getting ready for the big day. He watches, horrified, as the Supreme Pig Leader speaks to the masses, literally bending them to his will, as their massed faces begin to twist in unison.

The hero is kidnapped by the secret police, carried to the palace, and subjected to an elaborate mind control regime, utilizing torture, sexual titillation and various electronic gadgets for sensory re-programming. He may seem an extreme case, being molded into a kind of Manchurian candidate to carry out a key assassination that the regime desires, a kind of enigmatic, Thomas Crooks or Tyler Robinson figure, but as he is plugged into a massive wall of video screens, his brain covered with electrodes, there is no separating his fate from our own. We are all being programmed, in ever more effective ways, all the time.

Fully re-programmed, he is released into the world to do his job. Entering a gun shop, decorated with “Don’t Tread on Me” posters and pictures of hot babes with assault rifles, our hero shops for his weapon. A pair of bucks, dressed as hunters, secretly pick him out as a likely mark. The hunted will become the hunters, in a kind of Jack Rubyesque scheme for hiding the evidence of the crime.

Of all the enigmatic figures that appear in the film, the most haunting is a totemic god standing in a field made of white fur, a man with the head of a longhorn steer, holding a knife in his left hand, a human heart in this right hand, and his crotch covered with a death’s head. One looks with dread at this ominous figure, balancing the forces of anger, fear, and desire. Tuthill labels him Tantalus, the subterranean master god controlling this system of demonic enslavement through competing drives and obsessions, never fulfilled.

In the film’s inevitably circular logic, the assassin’s victim finally turns out to be himself, his rebellious self, the self seen performing calisthenics on the beach, training for revolution. Our acts of revolutionary violence, it seems, are being secretly engineered to neutralize effective dissent. In a comic twist, the man’s rifle shot aimed at his alter ego on the beach misses, but the bullet startles an eagle overhead which is carrying a turtle. The bird drops the turtle, which falls on the beach and kills the exercising man. A crowd gathers, seeming to view what happened as a sign of divine intervention, holding the turtle aloft in a shaft of light. The slapstick timing of this unexpected twist recalls Terry Gilliam’s animations, in which objects frequently fall from the sky onto hapless victims. In this context, it is reminiscent of many recent political shootings, in which strange coincidences cloud the circumstances, making it nearly impossible to assess what happened and why, but the shootings nevertheless go on to being transformed in the online echo chambers into sacred signs of whatever the latest fanatical trend happens to be. Their attention is fully re-directed in an irrelevant direction: mission accomplished.

Sometime after the fateful shot has been fired, our hero finds himself being pursued by an enormous angry mob, emblems of the mob justice style of pile-ons so typical of our social media age. The linchpin of the system of power is the creation of scapegoats, fall guys, to deflect anger away from the ruling pigs. The many goats we have seen in the film so far are so many portents, pointing their fingers towards the fate of the chosen scapegoat. The hero, fleeing the mob, tumbles off a cliff and is seen falling, plummeting through the air in free fall. Unmoored from the norms and rules that previously anchored society, he completely loses his bearings.

Periodically throughout the film, we see our hero with a strange growth emerging from his forehead. In the film’s epilogue, the death figures of the regime cut this growth cleanly from his head. Perhaps they are excising the pineal gland, the inner godhead, the man’s innate wisdom, spirituality, his fighting spirit. Born and raised to be a scapegoat, his sacrifice was deemed crucial to the regime. In the last shot we see him back in his hotel room just after shooting his rifle, sirens screaming in the distance, looking more lost and confused then ever.

The film’s landscapes have the desolate, death-strewn beauty of Mexican folk art. The lonely guitar music played by the billy goat gives the scenes the elegiac, legendary feeling of folk ballads, telling of a lonely hero who’s life ends in ruin. We are left alone at the end in the desert, in Death Valley, mourning the loss of everything: of freedom, family, the chance to live our lives in peace. By the time the smoke clears we are left every bit as bewildered as the hero, wondering where everything went.

El Vergonzoso is impossible to dismiss. Its abundance of visual beauty demands attention. Tuthill’s scrupulous avoidance of specific political references means that viewers of all political persuasions are forced to recognize the authoritarianism being depicted within their own political camp. The film’s events, deeply poetic and symbolic, defy simple interpretation, but instead gnaw at your insides with their insistent tidings of a society where we are made to become addicted to our own subjugation. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his poem Requiem for a Friend in 1908. His beloved friend, painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, had died in childbirth a year earlier, and in a delayed reaction, Rilke wrote the haunting and powerful poem in three days, in a paroxysm of grief, while holed up in a Paris hotel room. Filmmaker Antero Alli uses a complex dramatic scheme to bring the poem vividly to life in his absorbing, beautifully made film incantation of Rilke, The Greater Circulation. The film contains the full text of the poem, read with consummate clarity, simplicity, and insight by Alli himself, accompanied by scenes of Rilke (portrayed perfectly by Lloyd Bricken) writing the poem in his hotel room, and a very complex montage of dreams, fragmentary images, and incidents related to the poem. The footage, shot on Super 8 and tinted sepia, is gorgeous. It is greatly enhanced by magical visual effects sequences, created by Michael McWhirter, which are among the most dense and beautifully made visual collages I have ever seen to accompany poetry. (They put Eric Drooker’s animation of Ginsberg’s Howl in the movie version of that poem to shame.)

But the poem is just one strand in Alli’s complex scheme. The film also tells the story of Roland (Lee Vogt), an experimental theater directer in contemporary Berkeley, who is creating an avant-garde staging of the poem in collaboration with three actresses. They women play female archetypes who shape the consciousness of both Rilke and Modersohn-Becker: The Mother, The Artist, and The Soul (who is forced to choose between motherhood and art.) They regard their performance not as a play, but as a magical ritual, and by the end of the film, the ritual is shown to have startling and permanent effects on the lives of several characters.

In a pivotal role, Bricken also plays Albert, a young Rilke-obsessed theater critic who is stalking Roland and the production. He ends up with an unexpected and central role in the performance, and without giving away key aspects of the story, it becomes clear that there is a logical reason why the same actor who plays Albert also plays Rilke. (He is astonishingly different and equally effective in both roles.) The story, generally speaking, is richly enhanced by multiple parallels between the story of Rilke and Modersohn-Becker and that of the Berkeley artists.

Share

The story has some highly implausible elements, and the dialog in the film is often stilted and overly schematic, but these weaknesses cause surprisingly little damage to the film, which remains vividly gripping and rich with layers of meaning. (Probably the most implausible element of the story is the notion of a poetry-loving theater critic avidly pursuing an avant-garde director.) Alli has written that he wanted the images to tell the story in this film more than the words, and he has certainly succeeded. Sylvi Alli, Felicia Faulkner, and Leah Kahn, who play the three actresses, are all excellent. In their different ways, each conveys their fascination with the director Roland, and their identification with the plight of Modersohn-Becker, since they are also women artists who experience the conflict between family and art. Despite the problems with the film’s script, it is their physical and vocal presence in the film that brings the story to life, and since they are performing silently in a danced version of the poem, this is far more important.

The film subtly and poetically explores the different social positions of male and female artists from a variety of angles. Rilke told Modersohn-Becker that she was of a special class of women artists who are meant to put their creativity into art, rather than into children, in order to provide what he called “the greater circulation.” It’s too bad he didn’t provide a practical form of birth control, so that she could put his idea into practice. But then, her constant depiction of mothers with babies in her paintings showed that her own view was a different one.

Both Rilke and director Roland are depicted as brilliant, sensitive, but flawed men, who use women for their own needs. Roland in particular is a compulsive manipulator, as he carefully cultivates a cult-like reverence among the actresses, who are awed by his refined sensitivity and insights into Rilke. We learn that he has had an affair with one of them at the same time his wife was dying, and a scene in which he apologizes to her for having “used” her is itself a fairly spectacular act of emotional manipulation, as he racks up points for being such a sensitive and vulnerable guy. But he is not a simple cad, but also a genuine artist and good-hearted soul, so he is highly conscious of his faults. By the end of the film he has found a way to expiate his sins by giving a kind of startling gift.

Watching the film, one is preoccupied much of the time with the story of Roland and the actresses, but the ultimate function of this story in the film is to bring us closer to Rilke’s poem. By intercutting the poem and the Rilke footage with a more contemporary story, Alli has opened up many hidden dimensions of the poem for contemporary viewers, making it easy for us to imagine Rilke’s and Modersohn-Becker’s situation as our own. The vision of these contemporary artists, literally haunted by Rilke and his tale of being haunted in turn by his friend, vividly dramatizes the power of art to channel powerful forces and alter the course of our lives. The story gives us the way into the poem, but it is Rilke’s powerful poem, as illuminated by Alli’s recitation and the beautiful sequences of Rilke in his Paris hotel room, that delivers such a poignant protest against the premature ending of a painter’s life and of her art.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Nine Nina IX is an unusual film hybrid. An 8 minute short by T.E.W. Prak, a collaboration with composer Tim Trappett, the film is billed as a “space opera” and is, in fact, an operatic sci-fi themed short. While the written synopsis outlines a plot about nine cloned sisters placed by a mad scientist on the Cassini Saturn probe in 1997, the film itself doesn’t provide any narrative details for the viewer. Instead, we are swept along in Trappett’s musical score, beginning with an extended soul/pop aria for Nina, who is presumably the ninth and final clone, who sings of her longing to break free of the conditioning implanted in her by her creator/programmer. The second half of the film is an extended folk-tinged song in waltz time, sung by a character identified as Lt. John Walker. Visually, the film is a collage of expressive, loosely painted watercolor panels depicting moments from the story, mixed with highly processed footage of the singers, their faces transformed into pools of color. Song lyrics and many additional bits of text are flashed on the screen, which serve both to clarify the lyrics and also as graphic elements in their own right, evoking the spaceship ambience, where crowded spaces are lined with computer monitors.

Taken together, these elements have a surprising emotional impact. Singer Rebecca Janz brings passion and focus to her portrayal of Nina. Her song becomes an impassioned plea for everyone who has ever longed to break free of the confines of an imprisoning system. The poetic and abstract lyrics refer to her dismay at memories and thoughts that don’t seem to be her own, and her sense that her consciousness has been shaped and manipulated by others for their own ends is one that resonates with contemporary viewers, with our media environment that manipulates us in ever more devious ways.

Singer Nick Gramm’s portrayal of Lt. Walker presents him as a comforting voice, one who sings to Nina that she will one day realize her dream of returning home, even while we read onscreen that she has been “terminated.” He is a tragic figure, watching the progress of the spaceship on monitors, as he strums his guitar and sings from a wheelchair. At the end of his song the terminated Nina opens her eyes once again and smiles, finally home.

Share

Prak’s watercolor paintings are evocative and compelling. They mythologize the story, giving the feeling that we’re reading an illustrated book about a historic event. The use of hand-made paintings seems, by its nature, to reflect Nina’s rebellion against the technology that created and controls her life. The swirls of video color surrounding the singers, in beige and brown for Nina and blue for Walker, effectively blend the artwork layers with live footage, adding emotional context.

It is not an easy artistic task to take these disparate media, watercolor paintings, live footage, pop opera, and sci-fi allegory, and make them into a coherent whole, but Prak does an excellent job of seamlessly joining them into a hybrid form that has its own aesthetic logic and emotional power. Nina, the heroine who bravely tries to unplug from her own programming and literally finds her own voice, speaks to those of us searching for exits from the control grid. Prak seems to have devised his own artistic escape route, crafting a new kind of space opera to open up exit points from a digital prison. It’s an inspiring achievement on several levels.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Van McElwee’s beautiful short Natureland is a complex collage of nature scenes interwoven with industrial images. The industrial images include cinderblock walls, air ducts and exposed pipes in a construction site. The nature images include shots of waves, waterfalls, and masses of flowers and leaves. The music is created from distorted, looped, and collaged layers of banal Muzak.

At first glance, it seems this piece is simply presenting the familiar opposition of “beautiful nature” to “ugly manmade structures,” but it quickly becomes apparent that the visual discourse of this film is far more complex and nuanced. In McElwee’s skillful collage technique, the nature images are always closely aligned, visually, with the industrial images, so that we see the verticals of trees emerging seamlessly from among the vertical pipes in a machine room. The film’s visual strategies emphasize the similarities of nature and industry, not their differences. The manmade world can be seen as an outgrowth of nature. So many tools and manmade objects are directly inspired by plants: wires and pipes which are like roots and stems, and even solar panels, which mimic leaves. By shooting a construction site rather than a finished factory, McElwee emphasizes the structural, nature-like aspect of machines.

An unspoiled natural landscape is almost always heartbreakingly beautiful, primarily because it is real and organic, each part of the scene infinitely complex and expressing its own inner nature. But banal “nature photography” of pretty mountains and seascapes, as used in bank calendars and postcards, is offensive in its crass, reductive commercialism, and much of the footage in Natureland comes from these genres. The film’s soundtrack demonstrates that if you take hideous Muzak and layer and distort it in creative, interesting ways, you can create quite interesting and beautiful music. Likewise, McElwee’s expert collage technique turns the banality of “nature images” into a gorgeous visual trip.

Share

The last third of the film, in particular, is breathtaking to watch. The camera is always in motion as we watch these complex, superimposed layers of images, so that we feel we are falling with the water in a waterfall, or rising into the clouds, or flying through the fall foliage. He uses complex color schemes to emphasize the natural lines and contours of his imagery, using his collage techniques not to compete with nature’s beauty or to try and add to it, but to help us to see it better. Natureland helps us to see the organic qualities of manmade objects, and how digital technology can be used to redeem images of nature from the purgatory of bank calendars While this in no way negates the negative effects of technology on the environment, it gives us a more nuanced and subtle way of thinking of our relationship to our world than a simplistic dichotomy of “man” versus “nature.”

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Martin Gerigk’s new 5 minute short, I Was Here, a collaboration with José Crúzio, is part of a series instigated by Crúzio in which he films marginalized and transitional sites and invites other artists to help bring out hidden qualities in the site to make a short artistic statement. Crúzio gave Gerigk a clip of a desolate beach outside Figueira, Portugal, where a large excavator is digging a hole in the sandy soil. Crúzio asked Gerigk to incorporate the text of Man and Machine, D.H. Lawrence’s poem about mankind and our transfer of religious beliefs to the newer secular gods of technology.

Gerigk renders the footage in stark black and white, a letterboxed horizontal frame emphasizing the long expanse of the low dunes and scrubby brush. The Lawrence text appears across the sky in stylishly-designed type. Throughout the film there is a detailed interaction between the text, the movements of the excavator, and Gerigk’s musical score of electronically altered sounds. The scraping of the giant shovel is given reverb and density, detaching itself from the imagery and rising in a cloud of sound as an idealized sonic image of mankind scratching at the earth for subsistence. With the poem’s first line, “Man invented the machine,” we hear the laughter of a baby, ironically emphasizing that this particular birth was quintessentially human. In Gerigk’s music, the poetic interplay between altered sounds, text and the movements of the excavator provides subtle and multivalent commentary.

Share

Gerigk’s primary editing tool here is the jump cut. At odd moments the long arm of the excavator suddenly jumps forward, or to the side, accompanied by the distinctly mechanical sound of a ping or a piston. The jumpy, unpredictable rhythm of these cuts emphasizes their jarring nature, as they disrupt the smoothly flowing illusion of cinema. In conventional filmmaking, the jump cut is frowned upon, precisely because it pulls the viewer out of the illusion that they are watching “real life” and makes them suddenly aware of the mechanical contrivances of moving images. Gerigk exploits this disruption to effectively bring our attention to the act of film editing as a perfect embodiment of the poem’s theme of mankind both shaping and being shaped by machinery.

We hear slow breathing, an oddly mechanical breathing. A greatly slowed-down voice drones on, which might be the voice of the excavator itself, complaining about the amount of sand it is forced to scoop up. We hear the clattering of a lid on top of a pipe, as it flaps up and down, an ongoing chattering voice, urging the shovel onward. In a striking sequence, the jump cuts become so fast that the excavator appears to have two arms, coming out to the sides, and it resembles a giant crab, digging in the sand.

In the closing sequence, Gerigk reverses the opening image, flipping left for right. This neatly mirrors the way that the poem ends with the same stanza it begins with, re-contextualized. The flipped image also references the basic theme of the poem: that the relationship between man and his machines has become flipped, with the machines now shaping people to serve their relentless drive to productivity.

By pairing this footage with this poem, Crúzio sets up an artistic premise ripe with implications, fully relevant to our own age, where machines bark orders at us all day long and cars scold us for taking a second too long to attach a seatbelt. Gerigk picks up the challenge of this premise, and with exemplary musical and visual discernment, opens up the many hidden layers in the text and re-combines them into a brooding meditation on using and being used by our tools.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Vat is a gorgeous, hypnotic video by Van McElwee, made entirely from images of machine parts and common household items which are shown rotating in front of a black background. Not being an engineer, I couldn’t identify too many of the specific machines, but I did recognize children’s toys such as jacks, plastic spray bottles, elbow plumbing joints, and a plastic salad spinner. The objects are viewed from above and at an angle, so the full scope of their three dimensional contours is revealed by the rotation, and the images are often rendered in saturated colors. McElwee uses a video effect so that the objects leave elaborate trails as they rotate, creating complex spiraling patterns and swirls of color. The sound is a continuously shifting cluster of ghostly tones, which were recorded by playing the sound of waves through the strings of a piano.

Share

Many of these objects are round and naturally suggest rotation, but even the square ones create elaborate symmetrical patterns when the video trails turn their motion into beautiful, mandala-like compositions. Indeed, the steady, even motion of the rotation and the overwhelming symmetry reminded me of imagery intended for meditation, but the fact that the symmetry here is created by motion through time as well as by the three spatial dimensions makes it particularly awe-inspiring to watch. At times, different objects recall spiraling DNA, lotus flowers, the human spine, and slithering snakes. We live in a spiraling universe, and McElwee has used his considerable artistic skills to magically transform everyday objects into an entrancing visual spectacle, simultaneously calming and invigorating to watch.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Choreographer and filmmaker Charles Dennis has been performing and making dances since the 1970s and films since the mid 1980s. He is the co-founder of renowned New York City arts space PS 122. I used to see Charles almost every week at the Open Movement dance jam event at PS 122, and I will always be grateful to Charles for giving me an opportunity, as a young artist, to perform at PS 122 several times in his legendary Avant-Garde-Arama series. He recently presented a retrospective 14 of his films at Upstate Films in Saugerties, New York. This is a look at some of them.

In his earlier works, some of Dennis’ video effects can feel arbitrary: playing with adding video echo effects, or doubling a dancer’s image, as if trying to add “visual interest” to moments of dancing that are already fully absorbing and need no embellishment. In his later works Dennis acquires more precision in his editorial choices, applying effects in a way which deliberately and effectively brings out latent qualities in passages of dance and performance.

Many of Dennis’ films are shot through with sequences of people breaking into wild dancing on the street, in the parks, in the subway. When I watched these performers dancing at PS 122 and other venues I often sensed that the wild energy, the reckless daring, the sense of frustration and the struggle to break free which characterized the style of “downtown New York dance” was intrinsically connected to the street energy of the city. New York streets of the 80s and 90s were an anarchic blend of drug addicts, thrill-seeking kids, homeless people, hipsters, artists and social-climbing yuppies. Dennis uses the power of the camera and the language of editing to make this connection between the streets and the stage explicit. Intercutting rapidly between shots of dancers on the city streets and performing onstage, we see how the daredevil recklessness of the dancing emanates from the city’s chaotic vibrance.

Remarkably, the music in many of these films strongly supports the choreography we’re watching, at least in a general way, despite the fact that it appears that the choreography wasn’t originally created or performed with the same music. Dennis applies music to dancing in the editing phase, the same tune extending over multiple shots in multiple locations. This results in an artistic trade-off: the music helps to tie together the choreographic energy as we jump from location to location, at the expense of losing the specificity of how some choreographers create their work as a direct response to a specific piece of music.

In After Rush Hour (2009), we see dancer Argyro Kourliti vocalizing a strange sound which could be laughter, crying, or both, but which feels ecstatic. Later, in a voice over narration, she tells us that she doesn’t want to feel love, she wants to feel something that is “human…ecstatic.” We see her taking the subway and breaking into moments of dance. We see performance footage with her remarkable elastic, pliable dancing, full of sudden moments of tension and release. The film is a tight, urgent portrait of an artist exploring both herself and the city.

AlexChristine (2019) is a dance portrait of the complexities of a relationship. Dancers Christine Bonansea and Alex Romania are seen dancing on plazas and high-rise buildings on opposite shores of the East River, vainly trying to signal to one another. Bonansea is seen several times trying to rouse Romania from a near-catatonic state, sometimes provoking him to anger. Dennis artfully blends scenes of full-out dancing with moments of ordinary life: sitting together on the couch or on the stoop of a brownstone, immersed in thought. This approach fosters a sense of dance as a natural outburst of energy and emotion, growing spontaneously out of ordinary moments. Breathing together, under a giant neon sign that reads “understanding,” they seem able to bridge the emotional gaps that divide them. They dance a fluid duet in rough unison, united in thought and movement, yet remaining distinct individuals.

Share

Contessa (1992), a collaboration with Bruce Tovsky, is a delightful dance fantasy. A woman wearing a tux rides on a flying armchair around the world, encountering other armchair-flyers along the way. Various surreal encounters ensue, enhanced by Bob Telson’s bouncy score, which sounds something like a flamenco video game. A beautiful woman catches the flamenco flavor in her dance solo and is offered a wad of bills. A standout moment is when Frank Conversano, as a singing waiter, lip-syncs an aria while pushing a hapless diner’s face into a plate of pasta. The film ends with an engaging ensemble dance. Dancers cross the screen at varying distances from the camera, on top of a rapidly shifting video texture.

Drone Girl—Destination Zena (2024) is a quirky tale which shows dancer Stacey Lynn Smith holed up in her Brooklyn apartment, where she becomes disgusted by seeing Night of the Living Dead on TV and runs out to her car, driving away towards the wilds of New Jersey. She finds a beautiful green field, a breathtaking expanse of nature, but she isn’t seeking the peace and grounding of reconnecting to the earth. Instead, she takes a small drone out of her backpack and sends it up into the air. Her attraction to the field isn’t milkweed flowers, insects and birds, it is simply a large space where she can play with her toy. It’s like flying a kite where you don’t have to pay any attention to the winds. Even better, her drone takes videos of herself dancing in the field, undoubtedly so she can post them to Instagram and impress her friends. It could just as easily be called Daytime of the Living Dead.

The title of Feet with the Beat (1985) is perhaps meant ironically: the film features a catchy latin-flavored score by Bob Telson and mostly shows shots of the feet of urban walkers, but their steps are not in sync with the music’s beat in any of the shots. A dancer (Dennis) is also seen, wearing one white shoe and one black shoe, doing fancier footwork. More dance sequences follow: light-hearted, celebratory, continuing on even when the music stops. This is another film that shows how daily movement in the urban environment directly inspires the way these performers dance. In the last shot we see them dancing up the steps and into PS 122, ready to go onstage and keep on boogying, with or without a musical beat.

NY 1985 (1985) was originally created to be screened as part of a live performance at The Kitchen, and shows a figure in a gas mask and protective suit, carrying an attaché case and walking through a landfill and New York neighborhoods poor and rich. The otherworldly salesman takes a bus, subway and what is known in New York as a “dollar van” to arrive in the financial district. Dennis performed in Robert Wilson’s work in the 1970s, and I see some of Wilson’s enigmatic surrealism in this haunting image, evoking both literal and metaphoric toxicity.

Onteora Ice Dance (2021) uses gorgeous drone photography to show Dennis skating in patterns on a frozen lake in Kingston, New York. The overhead shots emphasize how the spotted, streaked ice evokes a starry night sky. The streaks left by Dennis’ skates could be diagrams of constellations, or we might be looking at the event displays of subatomic particle collisions. A lovely, Arvo Pärt-like piano score by Peter Wetzler adds to the sparkling beauty of the skater’s circles.

We Are the Dinosaur (2005) is a collaboration with Bowery Poetry Club founder Bob Holman, who performs his apocalyptic poem, which is structured like a pop song, with a rock band. Dennis amusingly and effectively accompanies the poem’s image of humans as a doomed species with sequences of men and women dressed in business attire and adorned with dinosaur heads, taking cabs and having drinks in chic cafés, finally racing gleefully into the necropolis of Greenwood cemetery.

Dennis’ genius, both at PS 122 and in his current mid-Hudson Valley community, is to grow and foster a community of artists, connecting them and their work to the life and the people around them. His 40 year film practice exemplifies this talent, connecting both the urban and natural environments to unexpected eruptions of dancing. As his filmmaking skills sharpened over the decades, his cinematic visions have become increasingly refined and subtle, maintaining their message that, as Isadora Duncan said, “to dance is to live.”

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Robert Wilson‘s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin was a twelve-hour compendium of all of his previous works plus new material. During each intermission-less performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1973, audiences dozed, left the Opera House to chat and eat, but mostly watched, enraptured by a seemingly endless series of mysterious, beautiful events unfolding before them. Almost exactly fifteen years later, in December 1988, Wilson’s The Forest was performed in the same theater as part of its international tour. Inspired by the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the piece is also a second look at Stalin, fifteen years later, by a Wilson who’s become an international star of experimental visual performance.

Early Wilson productions, such as Stalin, used their extended duration to block the audience’s expectation that the work was going to tell them anything. They were so long and slow that watching them was more like looking out of a window for an entire day or moving to a strangely familiar foreign country. One saw details, fragments of stories: a woman holding a burning parasol and strolling with her husband, apes picking up apples and watching them rise slowly to the flies. One tried to fit the pieces together, to decide if the man with a bishop’s hat and talon-like nails was a priest or a devil, and whether he was cursing or blessing the woman he had almost, but not quite touched before exiting.

Ultimately, however, images such as these, seen at four o’clock in the morning as part of a series so long that it was not possible to remember all or even most of them, melted into what critic Stephen Brecht called an uninterpretable spectacle, one whose chief delight was the chance to see onstage a world as dense and unyielding as real life. The quiet dedication of Wilson’s mostly untrained performers added to this sense of magic realism.

In recent years, we’ve come to expect a different kind of work from Wilson. (That is, if we get to see it in this country at all. His very expensive spectacles are most often seen on the subsidized stages of Europe. West Berlin paid $2 million for the development and premiere of The Forest at the Theatre der Freien Volksbühne as part of the city’s 750th birthday party.) A good example was Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien, performed by the Paris Opéra Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House. It is an exquisitely crafted collage of words, music, and images, executed by highly trained performers. The sense of technical mastery extends to the sets, costumes, and lighting, and to the mise en scène itself, which is an elegant construction of crisscrossing visual motifs, arising somewhat obscurely from the source material, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 1911 ballet scenario.

These pieces are usually created in collaboration with accomplished writers, composers, and choreographers. Although they are still slow-paced by the standards of normal theater, they are typically two or three hours long and present their images in a stripped-down, minimalist style, so that instead of the dense, welcome-to-my-alternate-universe quality of the early works, we get to see one or two carefully framed events at a time: a woman lifts her fingers, the piano plays three notes, a bird flies across the stage. This sophisticated look gives the shows a more arty, inauthentic feel.

The Forest seems, at first, to be a typical recent work of Wilson’s. It is three and a half hours long and is a collaboration with writers Heiner Müller and Darryl Pinckney, composer David Byrne (of the band Talking Heads), and choreographer Suzushi Hanayagi, all of whom have worked with Wilson before, except for Pinckney. The polished lighting, sets, costumes, and sound were created by Heinrich Brunke, Tom Kamm, Frida Parmeggiani, and Hans-Peter Kuhn, respectively.

After reading the program notes and a digest of the Gilgamesh legend, I was ready for a slightly fussy series of meditations on ancient questions of friendship and death, somehow recast in the mid-nineteenth century, with the usual assortment of odd bits of text, imagery, and music thrown in to keep the audience awake. But as I watched I got a surprise. Not only did I recognize many images from Stalin, but I began at times to feel an emotional involvement I hadn’t felt at Wilson’s work for many years. I was moved.

Gilgamesh is a love story between two men. One is the great King Gilgamesh, a symbol of civilization’s apex. The other is Enkidu, a wanderer who speaks with animals, an emblem of the wilderness. It is really not any less strange than a typical work of Wilson’s; at one point Gilgamesh addresses an important speech to a doorway, and there are two conflicting versions of Enkidu’s death.

Wilson seems to have taken the themes of Gilgamesh, set them in the nineteenth century, and used them for his own meditations. The dawn-of-industrialism setting reminds us of our century’s debate about whether the conquest of nature has brought us salvation or ruin. When we first meet the character of Gilgamesh, he is seated stage center, facing away from us and hidden by a large chair, exactly like the mysterious King of Spain in Act Two of Stalin, only here we see female legs curling around his sides and hear sexual play and small talk. It’s like a cheap joke on the reserved tone of Stalin; the King of Spain having sex in a chair! (The image is funny enough to get a laugh, even from those who don’t know the reference.) We recognize other images from Stalin: the three men who enter to play a mysterious game at a table, the slit in the upstage wall through which we see an exterior space. Periodically, new characters enter stage left through a tall door, which opens with an oddly amplified mechanical whine.

Gilgamesh’s mother, the Goddess Ninsun, sits downstage at a table writing, and reading tarot cards. The cigar smoke rising from the chair is the only visible clue we have of Gilgamesh’s presence until he begins a long, tortured monologue, in which he tells of his infatuation with a whale and a ship’s propeller, mixes up the advice of psychiatrists and popes, and regrets the death of the Christians who drowned in a church, which was filled with water for the whale’s wedding.

He prances around the space, upsetting the game of the three men, and sits in a tiny throne. Meanwhile, through the upstage windows, we see men in coveralls moving horizontally and vertically over a grid of machinery. The faster the workers work, the crazier Gilgamesh acts, until the workers and machinery are destroyed by an apocalyptic explosion. This allegorical warning about the fate of industrialists gives a grandiose and cliched ending to a scene whose other details are appealing and precise.

In Act Three we see Enkidu on his home turf, deep inside a cave, where an old man hangs in a tub from the ceiling telling stories in German, while an eerily elongated black specter crosses. Through the cave’s upstage opening we see a parade of people, including a ballet dancer, a woman with a lobster, and some dancers dressed in straw who perform a ritual with knives. (Most of the imagery from this act comes directly from Stalin.) The knife-dancers try to enter the cave and are mysteriously sent back out, presumably because of Enkidu’s rejection of human culture. The cave is sealed with a row of metal bars, after which a child comes in and lies down, accompanied by the sound of broken glass.

In the next act we see Gilgamesh’s spirits lift as he is promised a friendship with Enkidu in a dream, which his mother interprets. While a Love Priestess sent by Gilgamesh from the temple entices Enkidu to come to the city, the actor playing Gilgamesh, Martin Wuttke, creates an amazing vocal storm of hope, fear, and nervous agitation. The Forest‘s story of an elegant, neurotic queen trying to attract the attentions of a virile, primitive man, dramatizes the twin conflicts of nature and culture, male and female, which are crucial to Gilgamesh. (In Wilson’s version, unlike the ancient one, nature is portrayed as the winner while culture is the loser.) What gives the story its peculiarly homoerotic twist is Gilgamesh’s despair of ever attracting Enkidu—it resembles a homosexual’s crush on a straight man. Gilgamesh first must entrap Enkidu through the ruse of the Love Priestess, and later retrain and reform him in a new mold. The situation recalls Pygmalion, The Wild Child, and even The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When Gilgamesh finally has Enkidu in his clutches, he displays him to a jeering crowd who cry, “He’s a fat pig,” but might as easily be ridiculing the effeminate, refined Gilgamesh for dreaming of being loved by him. Gilgamesh, in an elegant white suit, begins to cover Enkidu’s bare chest with white paint, but Enkidu reacts by trying to strangle him.

In Act Five, Gilgamesh and Enkidu seem to have become more like each other, dressed in identical suits. While a cabaret singer serenades them from one of the theater’s boxes, Enkidu literally brings a forest into the temple, and the act ends with the heroes’ embrace.

The Gilgamesh story reaches its climax in Act Six, which refers to the part of the epic in which Gilgamesh and Enkidu go together to vanquish the monster Humbaba, but in Wilson’s version there is no external monster. Rather, the “monster” seems to be the possibility of a sensual relationship between the two men.

Share

They set off into a darkened space, standing on chairs and using them as stilts, only to encounter nothing. Enkidu rests his head on Gilgamesh’s lap, and the high-strung Gilgamesh responds with a snow-flurry of nervous, agitated language, doubled and redoubled through an electronic echo-device. Wilson often tries to offset the lush perfection of his images with harsh and jarring sounds, which in this visually empty scene works wonderfully. His persistent use of electronics to place the voices as if coming from behind the audience serves not only to create an intimate “closeup” of the voice, but to disassociate the act of speech from the stage image, as if the actors’ speeches were not so much a conversation but a kind of ongoing, subliminal mental activity in the back of the spectator’s or Wilson’s mind. The fragmented nature of the texts themselves, often in several languages, adds to his impression.

Now that the longed-for contact has arrived, Gilgamesh is too frightened to know how to respond. Eventually he mounts Enkidu’s shoulders, and the two, thus united, move through the space on the chair: totem pole, man/god, united couple, their opposition fusing into one supernatural entity. They encounter asymmetrical squares of variously colored light on the floor, and a mountain which breaks up to reform as a cloud. At the end of the scene Enkidu very slowly lies on the floor, variously interpretable (as always in Wilson’s work) as an act of earth worship, death, or sleep, and Gilgamesh mourns him with one of his beautiful wordless arias of crying laughter.

Wilson seems to have used both Stalin and Gilgamesh as initial texts from which to build The Forest, and they each become more or less evident at different times in the performance. It’s as if in looking at Gilgamesh Wilson found once again the story he often told, however obliquely, in his early work: a young child, somehow “outside” the culture, in return rejects it and achieves a visionary state by withdrawing into his own inner world. In the early works, this role was represented by Raymond Andrews, the deaf-mute boy whose mother, in Deafman Glance, first gives milk to and then kills his two siblings. In The Forest, we see this role in Enkidu, whom the ancient text calls “man-as-he-was-in-the-beginning.” The ambiguous social authority he must transcend is represented by Gilgamesh. This subtext gives the images in The Forest much more emotional undertow and less of the haphazard look of Wilson’s other recent work.

In his early work (the pieces compiled in Stalin), the real beauty came not from the images themselves, but from the fantastic nature of the stage events. In Act One of Stalin, when Sheryl Sutton, a tall, handsome black woman, has been sitting immobile in a chair with a bird on her wrist, ignoring a bewildering array of passersby (an image which is repeated in The Forest), there is a famous moment when first one, and then an entire chorus of Aunt Jemima-style mammies dance across the stage to the strains of “The Blue Danube” waltz. Although she does not outwardly acknowledge their presence, we somehow feel that they are part of her fantasy. This moment is striking for its whimsical improbability, but also because of a cluster of possible meanings, especially about Ms. Sutton’s character and her feelings toward the traditional role for black women. As an image, it’s not particularly striking, at least not in the painterly sense of his recent stage pictures, but as an event forty-five minutes into a twelve-hour play that has already defied any ready interpretation, it is striking indeed.

Wilson’s recent work often seems as if it is a demonstration of the new, freer possibilities that performance art offers for the stage. Look, the work seems to be saying, staging doesn’t have to illustrate text; characters of differing historical periods or styles can coexist in a scene; the parts of a performance don’t have to be related logically; the style of the music doesn’t have to match the style of the imagery (as in the New Orleans jazz score with the Japanese dances of The Knee Plays); and the character’s attitude doesn’t have to match his situation (as in the hanged man who whistled calmly in The Golden Windows). This is art which extols new possibilities, new compositional choices for the artist. But these juxtapositions, instead of seeming either significant or truly arbitrary, often seem merely pointedly farfetched: for example, the Hopi ballet dancers who surrounded Garibaldi’s troops in the CIVIL warS. The choices speak mainly of the artist’s liberation from the older rules of the theater. We sense, in their aggressive freedom, his self-satisfied enjoyment of his own advanced aesthetic sense.

Wilson’s earlier work also contained these disjunctions between words, sounds, music, gestures, and decor. But he did not pursue them for their own sake. Wilson often described the deeply intuitive process of his collaboration with Raymond Andrews on Deafman Glance. Wilson wanted, not to show off his technique, but to find images for the shifting, multi-layered textures of subconscious thought, and he used the authentically ordinary aura of his untrained performers as a kind of “reality check,” so that by including Scotty Snyder’s reminiscences about summer in Iowa he could be sure his work would have the rugged texture of real life, as well as the whimsical mutability of his fantasies.

In the eighties, Wilson became a superstar and stopped producing a nonverbal theater of extended duration with untrained actors. These days Wilson uses other artists and writers as his reality check. Working with artists brings artists’ concerns to the work, questions of composition, balance, and tone. It’s as if, having achieved Stalin, Wilson looked back on his previous work, read what others had to say about its groundbreaking techniques, said, “Oh, isn’t this man an interesting artist, the way he combines these different images....” and then had only mediocre success imitating his own earlier work.

Continuing unabated is his ability to create a series of “stunning” initial images—stage pictures which often receive applause as the curtain rises and which are both breathtaking and schlocky, as if created by an opera designer who simultaneously had a passion for Maxfield Parrish posters and for Salvador Dali. The events which make up the rest of the show have an arbitrary feel to them, as if, having thought up the initial images, Wilson was at a loss as to how to fill the remaining time.

In some ways, The Forest seems to try to present a reconciliation between the intuitive, preverbal, pre-Stalin Wilson and the masterful, aesthetic eighties Wilson. And there are moments where this reconciliation is achieved, to startling, poignant affect. The child’s death in the cave moves us as it did in Stalin, even as we appreciate the sped-up, skillful abstraction. Of course, there are some real clinkers, moments where Wilson the eighties showman starts pulling out the stops and you can hear the gears click into motion—literally, in David Byrne’s score—for the Big Effect, such as the “a vista” scene change from one part of the forest to another in Act Four. These moments are awful, because we feel a resentment at being shown glib special effects while the engaging subterranean feelings raised by the piece are summarily dropped.

In Act Seven, immediately after Gilgamesh’s eulogy of Enkidu—as eloquent, in a different way, as the extended and beautiful eulogy in the Gilgamesh epic—Wilson has the light reverse so that the two suited men, who were in an immense dark space, are now the only dark spots in an enormous white space. Another “stunning” moment, which, with all its minimalist purity, draws applause. It was hard for me to decide whether I was more annoyed by the image’s manipulative pizazz or riveted by its beautiful embodiment of the reversal in Gilgamesh’s fortunes. Nowhere does The Forest give evidence that its images have been explored deeply enough for us to trust them.

Wilson’s late work is all about collages. They are light, elusive edifices, whimsically constructed by collaborative artists in order to elicit a play of associations in the audience. His earlier work, however, seemed practically excavated, as if a primordial reality in our collective unconscious had been painstakingly dug up and each archaic detail set before us, lacking only a plausible interpretation, and this encouraged us to trust that the details, however arbitrary or even unspectacular they seemed, were vital clues.

Gilgamesh follows Enkidu through the white space, presumably on his way to the underworld. They are still dressed in identical suits, but Enkidu is now barefoot. When they are midway across, there is a large musical fanfare and the heroes are confronted with a group of Mysterious Hooded Figures, which slowly enters as the lights fade. This ending, which abruptly drops the themes that have preoccupied us throughout The Forest—nature versus culture and effeminacy versus masculinity—and substitutes instead a generic image of The Unknown, feels in every way a cheat. Usually when we see an effect this cheap in a Wilson work, we look for the touch of irony that lets us know he is satirizing all Big Effects in the theater, including his own, like the funny and overdone moment in the German section of the CIVIL warS when a continent splits open to reveal Voltaire reading from his works. The Forest leaves us panting like a lover who’s been seduced and then abandoned; gratified by the intermittent return of emotional engagement to Wilson’s cool formalism and bewildered by its abrupt withdrawal.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Bigger Than Us, The Berkeley Pit is a 9 minute short by Dominic Angerame, a portrait of a huge open-air copper mine in Butte, Montana. The closed mine dominates the city geographically, and also financially, culturally, historically, and in the on-going health effects from the highly toxic metals and chemicals which fill the bright blue-green water in the pit. (The pit is a designated Superfund site.) After a few opening titles which briefly introduce us to the pit and its history, the film becomes a wordless visual montage, almost always superimposing several layers of footage. Angerame combines color video footage with black and white film footage, and this contrast helps us to make sense of the different layers. Like the pit itself, the film weirdly combines a sense of stark ugliness and beauty. The shots of abandoned industrial equipment, disturbed land in which no signs of life remain, possess an unearthly, terrible kind of beauty, especially in the color layers, where the weirdly greenish water shimmers beneath the bare rocks which surround it.

Wordlessly, the film challenges us to make sense of our response to the visual beauty of this death-filled place. Philosophically, the film sent me into reveries of speculation about the larger meaning of toxicity, in biology, in ecology, and in the human heart.

While an individual species may have a toxic reaction to one or another chemical, what can we say about the exposure of chemicals so toxic they have the effect of killing nearly everything, creating a desert-like environment? (The semi-arid climate of Butte tends in that direction anyway.) Looking at biological life from a holistic, Gaia-inspired perspective, life emerged from the chemical and mineral nature of earth, and ultimately is an expression of it. The sulfuric acid, copper, arsenic, and other toxins in the pit may have been exposed, in this case, by man’s industrial intervention, but they are all part of our planet, part of what we emerged from. While individual creatures aim to protect themselves from danger, and individual species aim to pass on their genes, nature’s ecosystems foster dynamic balance and change, opening pathways for increased diversity and evolution. In the dynamic balance of nature, certain populations may wane at times and wax at others. Even catastrophic events, ones which produce mass die-offs, open a space for new evolution of the few hardy species that survive. When we look at the stark, terrifying beauty of the Berkeley Pit, we seem to hear the voice of old chemical, mineral Earth herself, a voice much more ancient than life. Terrifying in its pitiless disregard for us, for the plants, for the animals. Beautiful, like the strange ancient song of our ancestors. We are aware that these toxins have been exposed by the shortsighted pursuit of gain by a few men, heedless of future consequences, and we are humbled.

Towards the end of the film there is a remarkable sequence in which we pass through a long tunnel, through which tourists can access a viewing platform. Angerame layers multiple perspectives of the tunnel: upside-down, sideways, the twisting angles disorienting us and creating the sensation that we are not merely walking through a tunnel but through a portal to a strange, supernatural realm. The sequence evokes the terrifying tunnel scene in Stalker, another film about approaching an abandoned toxic site with trepidation. Arriving through the end of the tunnel onto the viewing platform and confronting the stark deadliness of the pit, we might have arrived at the shores of a lake in Hell, and the pit seems to radiate with its own disturbing power.

Share

The Berkeley Pit provided a decent standard of living to miners until it was closed in 1982 . Nevertheless, as an extractive enterprise, it brought vastly more wealth to the shareholders of the Anaconda Company than it did to the miners. It also brought respiratory disease, neurodegenerative disorders, and cancer, and continues to do so. When the pit closed, it didn’t simply decimate the local ecosystem, it dealt a death blow to the financial health of the citizens of Butte as well. Just as a devastated ecosystem can become an incubator for organisms able to survive in extreme circumstances, the devastated economy of Butte has also given rise to a number of new enterprises, struggling to find a foothold in a changed landscape.

In Bigger Than Us, Angerame uses the visual poetics of montage to immerse us in both the beauty and the ugliness of this hole, this deeply disturbing gash in the earth. It seems there is tremendous amount of significance, much to ponder and wonder at, in the journey through this particular tunnel.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now

dreambody/earthbody is a compelling new film by Antero Alli, in which he documents recent developments in the Paratheatrical Research work he has been conducting since 1977. Paratheater is a term which was first used by Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski for a kind of work which uses the body and voice techniques employed by actors, but instead of using them to create plays intended to be performed for an audience they are used by workshop participants to explore inner reality, and as a spiritual and self-healing practice.

The specific series of workshops documented in the film are designed to make connections between one’s dream life and waking life. The seven participants are asked to take physical movements which they remember from their dreams and form these movements into a simple, repeatable sequence. In very carefully calibrated stages, over the course of seven weeks, Alli guides them so they are mentally and physically prepared to use these movements as a gateway, allowing the energies and emotions of their dreams to re-emerge during a trance state and become available through the body to the waking self.

Share

Alli’s technique involves using the body as a resource, and his work follows from the premise that deep knowledge, not only of ourselves but also knowledge of human culture and history, can be found by listening deeply into our muscles, bones, and fully inhabiting our physical selves. It is truly remarkable, watching the footage from these workshops, how using movements remembered from dreams seems to unleash powerful memories and feelings from the unconscious in a way that can sometimes be very difficult if you just sit up in bed and try to recall a dream. The participants use movement and vocalizing to experience these unleashed forces, but not words, so it is impossible for the viewer to know what they are experiencing in detail. Nevertheless, one can easily see that they are surrendering to a deep and authentic kind of inner revelation, quite different from the kind of performance one usually sees in a theater.

The film includes footage of the workshops, shot in stylish monochrome video, and also several re-created fragments from dreams in beautiful color collage sequences, which help to clarify and dramatize the way that fragments from dreams are used in the workshop. The film also gives a more or less complete outline of the techniques involved, so that any viewer would be able to explore some of these same practices on his or her own.

The film also presents interviews with the participants, who attempt to explain what they experienced and also their goals. Since this work explores a realm which is beyond language and conceptual thought, it may be frustrating at times for the viewer to listen to interviews in which the speakers are at a loss for words to describe what they felt. But one can pick up as much from their body language as from their words: the workshops have clearly opened a door for these people to find levels of reality that are normally closed to us, and they find the experience thrilling and liberating. Several of them find the workshops directly useful in their professional work (two of them as actors, and one as a martial arts teacher.) dreambody/earthbody will whet your appetite for Paratheater, and make you excited to find out more about this unusual technique of tapping into the power of our dreams.

My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.

Subscribe now