Ralf's Colors (Lukas Marxt, 2019) (Patreon)

German-based, Austrian-born experimental filmmaker Lukas Marxt has been an interesting figure for quite awhile now. Where so many of his Viennese colleagues have produced a unique brand of cinema that focuses squarely on the materiality of the filmstrip and the physical manipulation of images, Marxt has followed a different path. Seemingly inspired by the process-oriented video art of the 1970s (e.g., Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Peter Campus, Woody and Steina Vasulka) as well as the massive sculptural interventions of folks like Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, Marxt has made a number of films that, in various ways, operate a bit like performance documents. (They sometimes resemble the short films that sculptors like Smithson and Richard Serra made to record their sculptural interventions.) 

For example, 2013's Reign of Silence watches a lake as a motorboat enters the frame and follows a particular set of directions, designed to "draw" spiral patterns on the surface of the water. We then watch them dissipate. Likewise, Circular Inscription (2016) consists of a long shot of the desert, penetrated by a car that drives in wide circles in the sand, making a mark in the image field similar to that in Reign of Silence. Even a more straightforward, less action-oriented film such as Imperial Valley (cultivated run-off) (2018) looks at the already-built environment -- in this case, the viaducts and irrigation canals running through California's Imperial Valley -- as something sculptural and alien, much in the same way Smithson described the aesthetic character of the unfinished highway through Passaic, New Jersey.

After a number of medium-length works, Marxt has produced his first feature. Ralf's Colors shares certain affinities with his earlier work, particularly in its intensive examination of landscape. In this case, Marxt is filming on Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands. It is mostly comprised of rough volcanic rock, which provides both wide vistas and up-close craggy textures for Marxt to explore, and a great deal of Ralf's Colors consists of Marxt exposing fragments of the landscape to various forms of light, including strobing, flashlight, and fire.

But the heart of Ralf's Colors -- and here is where the film becomes, shall we say, tricky -- is Ralf Lüddemann. The film is essentially a multifaceted portrait of him and his isolated life on Lanzarote, treating the untamed landscape as an objective correlative for his psychic states. And those states are extreme, given that Ralf is an untreated schizophrenic. Throughout the film, he provides Marxt with a calm, steady, but emphatic monologue detailing his complex and incomprehensible cosmology. In Ralf's view, people and rock formations seem to have a kind of coextensive existence, we are living in "fantasy" and "half-fantasy" time determined in part through our ability to give birth to planetary being, and light and color seem to have a solidity that wills into being what we mistakenly perceive as "objects." 

Needless to say, it is difficult to follow, and after a single viewing I am sure I missed some crucial points of Ralf's philosophy. To say that it is only somewhat less systematic than (for example) Spinoza or Schelling is to recall that the Western tradition is filled with metaphysical schemas that, on their face, seem utterly loony. At one point I was reminded of On Light, or the Ingression of Forms by Robert Grosseteste, a 13th century text that is read aloud in the final part of Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma.

But there is something else going on here. Marxt is making a film in 2019, and he is fully aware of the ethical problems that making a film "starring" a mentally ill subject entails. Toward the end of the film, Marxt and Ralf are seen in a car, talking about the film and Ralf's (partial?) awareness of it. It is a moment seemingly designed to address the question of informed consent. But Ralf's Colors is, to a large degree, about the way that filmmakers fetishize subjects who may or may not fully comprehend how they are being represented. Whether it is the post-Bressonian "found objects" of Bruno Dumont, who has his country bumpkins play fictionalized versions of themselves, the self-performing subjects of Roberto Minervini's documentaries, or the outsider portraiture currently fashionable in experimental circles, this is a conundrum with no easy answer. Ralf's Colors forces these questions of "authenticity" and "primitivism" to a crisis point.