Wishing Well (Sylvia Schedelbauer, 2018) (Patreon)

I am a fan of Schedelbauer's work. Although there have been hundreds of "flicker films" and found footage films across the history of the avant-garde, her work has an unusual, pulsating rhythm that, against the odds, really feels like something new. Her way of simultaneously toggling between two distinct images while also adjusting the zoom, so that there's a competing hypno-wheel effect, truly hits the nervous system in an altogether uncanny way. It's like you can feel Schedelbauer's images drilling into your cerebral cortex.

This is why it's no pleasure to report that her latest film is a bit of a stumble. At first I thought it had to do with her adoption of color imagery for the first time. Lots of filmmakers have trouble when first introducing a new compositional element into their work. But on repeat viewings, it's not exactly that. Wishing Well begins with a close-up of a lake in the woods, from which Schedelbauer continually zooms back in a flashing, almost stacatto manner. As the alternate, flickering image, we see a young boy who looks like he stepped out of a 1950s Boy Scout manual.

As the film progresses, Schedelbauer plays with scale, bringing the boy closer and the trees further away, and then vice versa, so that what at first seems like a placing of the figure in the landscape is more assertively a superimposition of two figures that do not belong in each other's way. But as it continues, Wishing Well kind of goes all-in with this image of boyhood innocence, showing the kid with water in his hands (which becomes a rock formation), moving through space, and generally looking like a nostalgic emblem of another time and space. In previous films, Schedelbauer was careful not to allow us to cathect onto any given figure, distributing her affect across a wide array of objects and ideas. But here, there is an identification with this boy that is coming uncomfortably close to narrative.

As for the use of color, Wishing Well concludes by overlaying the color-positive and color-negative images of various close-ups of rock and tree formations. Although this results in a degree of abstraction, the blending of tones makes for a highly unclear compositional approach. Schedelbauer is still toggling and twisting the various forms, but it is hard to make anything out by this point. A return of the boy's hands near the end does not clarify the film's formal methods, and the ultimate impact is one of a move from the tidy to the discombobulated.