Tondal's Vision (Stephen Broomer, 2018) (Patreon)

No flies on Stephen Broomer! In addition to having made one of the most retro-poetic experimental films of the year, Fountains of Paris, he also completed a featurette of just over one hour, a film that bombards the senses with color and light and the occasional disturbing vision. The film is Tondal's Vision, a found footage fantasia that, at certain moments, calls to mind the work of Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Phil Solomon, Bruce Elder, and even Bill Morrison. But those similarities are fleeting and mostly ornithological, just a way to categorize the family resemblances and they flutter past. This is a highly original work, steeped in Broomer's own oddball-literate sensibility.

The basic source material for Tondal's Vision is an early Italian film version of Dante, and Broomer makes the most of the unique characteristics of this ur-text. Being a pre-Griffith specimen, the film adheres to the distance of the proscenium, with a static camera presenting a series of theatrical tableaux. This provides Broomer with considerable space with which to play, interjecting fields of color-reversal, solarization, scratches and dyes. But just as important is the content of the original film. Broomer is clearly entranced by the idea of making a film version of heaven and hell, and the dense electric shadows he teases out of the filmstrip speak to this lurking demonology. Pulsating reds and oranges compete with icy blues and purples, encasing Tondal the Knight in a photo-oxidized facsimile of extreme, even biblical weather.

Although there is much to see in Tondal's Vision -- deep scratches and paint strokes that spike the image with white light; the sickly yellow field surrounding a creature holding its own screaming, decapitated head; two men confronting a giant pair of feet at the banks of an apparent lake of fire -- I cheated a bit and put on 3D glasses sometimes while watching the film. I also donned prismatic lenses at other times. Both experiences were literally phenomenal. The 3D red / blue lenses polarized and deepened the film space, while the prismatics exaggerated planes and distances between planes. Point being, Tondal's Vision is a film rich with plastic effects, a text that stands up to all manner of manipulation. You can do a lot with it, and it will certainly do a lot with you.