Geometric Becomings 2 (Manuel DeLanda, 2019) (Patreon)

Manuel DeLanda is a truly odd case. In the late 1970s and throughout the 80s, he was kind of an enfant terrible even within the world of experimental film, making grotty punk films about defacing billboards (Ismism), torturing cockroaches (Judgment Day), or, in his most famous film, combining psychoanalytic tropes, film noir gags, and toilet humor (Raw Nerves: a Lacanian Thriller). Then he mostly abandoned filmmaking for philosophy, combining an interest in the work of Deleuze and Guattari with studies of science and artificial intelligence. He has written nine acclaimed books on Deleuzian materialism, the latest being Assemblage Theory (2016) and The Rise of Realism (2017).

But in recent years, he has returned to imagemaking, now with a somewhat predictable digital bent. Many of the works in question can be found on his Vimeo page, and while they are an uneven bunch, all are worthy of consideration and I find it somewhat dismaying that the broader experimental film world has not taken notice that such an important figure has reemerged. While I find his films that explore fractal manipulations of representational imagery most compelling, his pure abstractions are also notable.

A film such as Geometric Becomings 2 falls very much in line with a certain filmic and painterly tradition of nonobjective visual exploration, from Kandinsky and the Futurists through Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger. This work, broadly speaking, evolved from the geometrical style of the 1920s and 30s toward a freer, more musical approach, seen in filmmakers such as John and James Whitney, Mary Ellen Bute, and Jordan Belson. For the most part, this tendency in experimental film sent its practitioners into the arms of new technologies, and many of those sympathetic to this form of composition became computer animators -- Ken Knowlton, Scott Bartlett, Lillian Schwartz, Hy Hirsh, and others. 

Now, this strain of avant-garde film isn't my bailiwick, and I can't provide the proper context or analysis for this work that others could. But this is clearly where DeLanda's new work is coming from. Combining visual multiplication of forms with gestural electronic composition, Geometric Becomings 2 tends to organize larger scaffolds around small design units that, taken on their own, would resemble bits of analogue graphic design -- the backs of playing cards, for example, or cocktail napkins. From these rough, repeatable emblems DeLanda generates mobile architectural waves and voids.

Just as the music often refers momentarily to certain identifiable genre codes, such as children's animation or the circus, only to abstract away from them quickly, the visual forms sometimes hint at anthropomorphic or other animal movement, like a set of rings that snakes around and then dissolves, or a mountainous shape that throbs like a heartbeat. DeLanda seems to be calling on the tendency of the viewer to impute signification to purely abstract material, by dangling these aspects before us only to rapidly take them away.

I think that if computer animation were still more integrated into the dominant culture of the experimental film world, DeLanda's work would command more attention. As it stands now, digital animation seems to have definitively split off into its own realm, mostly as an R&D sector for character animation and/or video games. Visual music, meanwhile, has been hijacked by the screensaver. We may not be able to undo this conundrum, but it's certainly worth our consideration.