Two Recent Films by Friedl vom Gröller (Patreon)

I have been working, on and off, on a project that I have tentatively called "Small Films." The premise of this project is that there are certain filmmakers who make work that is not just "short," but casual in int approach to the idea of a work in the usual sense. They tend to be prolific, and I would argue that understanding their films requires seeing a lot of them. They make cinema the way certain painters or sculptors produce a folio of lithographs, as a connected suite to be apprehended in tandem with one another. Artists who sometimes work in this "small" mode include Kevin Everson, Helga Fanderl, and Luther Price.

Another -- possibly the most consistently "small" filmmaker currently working -- is Friedl vom Gröller. Most of her films are under four minutes long, many of them are informal portraits of friends or locations, and only a few seem to entail some performative or dramatic element. But two of her most recent films do indeed have a semi-fictional component. One works much better than the other, although this judgment is highly subjective. One is so cryptic as to be a bit discomfiting, and that may register as a compelling strategy for a certain stripe of viewer.

That would be Hochzeit im Paradies. Even in her most straightforward films, vom Gröller’s cinematic miniatures seldom linger long enough to generate a complete context for themselves. So they are often surprising and sometimes rather strange. This, her most recent film, begins with a brief shot of women meeting at an airport, and is immediately followed by a trip “back in time” through costuming and comportment. We observe a formal al fresco wedding between a grown man and a child bride. The man kneels down to "kiss" the bride, and then we see them retire to a wooden cabin, with the parson and an adult woman, for a meager supper. Played too straight to be comedy, the film shows a devious, even Surreal side of the filmmaker not often seen. But the young girl evinces no sense of joy or humor in this play-acting, which makes an uncomfortable scenario wholly creepy.

Much more compelling, and far more playful, is L'avenir, from 2018. Situated between casual document and staged performance, the film is crisp and beautifully composed, a contrast to the usual handheld insouciance that characterizes vom Gröller's approach to her subjects. And, in its own unobtrusive manner, L'avenir is a bit more conceptual that her usual work as well.

In a public laundry, we observe the intersection of two systems of visual signification. First, a woman (Corrine Gache) addresses the camera in sign language. Her sentences are repeated, the second time with a translation. We discover that she is waiting in the laundromat for her friend from Senegal (Aisha N’Dour) who will tell her fortune using cowrie shells. As Aisha reads the piles of shells on the folding table, we see that vom Gröller is herself using the language of silent cinema to organize a micro-drama of communication and hope within the drab spaces of the everyday.

What we are perhaps seeing is an evolution in vom Gröller's art, an attempt to apply her method of working -- very fast, highly intuitive -- to somewhat more preconceived projects. Given the pace at which she generates new material, we should know very soon if these two works point to a trend.