(tourism studies) (Joshua Gen Solondz, 2019) (Patreon)

Joshua Gen Solondz consistently makes some of the most unusual films around. Part of this has to do with a polymorphic sensibility that I have not quite put my finger on yet -- sometimes abstract and geometrical, at other times jagged and painterly, and at still other times exhibiting a psychotronic punk attitude. His latest, intriguingly titled (tourism studies), is sort of a rapid-fire combination of all of those modes, spun out in a centrifuge to create a persistently disorienting sense of non-space. Although Solondz is clearly working, in part, with material shot in various locales around the world, the title also suggests this enforced mode of spectatorship, a persistent inability to find one's footing.

The basic compositional procedure of (tourism studies) is a frame-by-frame alternation of contrasting images -- sometimes toggling between two different sequences, sometimes introducing a third into the mix or just alternating black space into the hyper-montage. Many filmmakers in the age of digital editing have begun to work with this back-and-forth thaumatrope approach, in part because what used to require painstaking physical cutting between single frames can now be accomplished with a few commands.

This in no way simplifies the conceptual process of making films this way, however. A filmmaker must intuitively understand differences in shape, tone, and texture, so as to create the maximum impact from his or her flicker-power. In Solondz's case, he not only alternates between photographic material from various events and locales -- footage, presumably, shot "on location" during his travels -- but also includes purely abstract and graphic material. Some shots are scratched and overworked, whereas others are clean and geometrical. And at various points, Solondz rapidly flips the images from left to right on a vertical axis, resulting in a combined symmetrical Rorschach effect.

What do all these images have to do with each other? We see go-kart races, a photographer at a military security zone in Israel, and some grainy black and white footage that appears to be from Germany, shot while just walking around. And Solondz seems to throw these images into a kind of blender with other filmic elements that, in context, operate like signifiers of the aesthetic. They communicate their lack of denotative content, the fact that they offer a temporary respite from the "worldly" content of the more naturalistic passages in the film.

So in a way, (tourism studies) is not so much about Solondz's travels. (The avant-garde is filled with many more conventional travelogue films, and they tend to use the centered subjectivity of the filmmmaker as the guarantor of their meaning.) Instead, it's about us, our gaze, and what it means to adopt the roving gaze of the tourist. (Gang of Four: "he fills his head with culture / he gives himself an ulcer.") The film, which drives images past us like the thrumming motor, functionally equates styles and situations that are, on their own visual evidence, qualitatively different. We are kept at arm's length by a wall of form, like visitors in a museum held back by a velvet rope.

(tourism studies) ultimately asks us to reflect on the epistemology for a unifying film form, one that assigns all images an equal value, making of them a kind of crypto-currency. (It is notable that Solondz alters the pattern at the end, focusing on a young woman's face. This signals a personal relationship to the person envisaged, even if none really exists.) From the news media to the Internet, an all-encompassing, unified form tends to flatten existential differences, turning everything around us into a consumable sight. How can we live this way, Solondz seems to ask, forever up in the air, perpetually at sea?