Two New-ish Films by Ephraim Asili (Patreon)

For the past two days, we were very fortunate to have Ephraim Asili visiting Houston presenting his work, through a joint effort of Aurora Picture Show and University of Houston's consortium on Media and the Moving Image. Effie presented the five films comprising his Diaspora Suite on Thursday October 10 at Aurora, and at UH showed a couple of those films (American Hunger and Fluid Frontiers) along with a group of less-often screened entries.

Two of them were recent works I had never seen before. The first was Return of the Electric Love (Take II), a film that had its original debut in 2016, but that Effie presented in a brand new (final, he thinks) 2019 edit. This is a film that represents Asili's first work with 35mm film stock, which he drew from the archives at LIFT in Toronto where he was in residency. Electric Love is comprised of excerpts from 1970s martial arts films, various discarded reels that had made their way through the international distribution circuit and landed up in Toronto where they were eventually abandoned. 

Working on a flatbed editor and rephotographing the material as he went, Asili treats the clips like jazz riffs, fixating on a particular movement or gesture and repeating it, staggering it, or whipping it back and forth, while subjecting it to a plethora of colored gel filters. He also uses the optical soundtrack on the 35mm filmstrips as thrumming, vibrant noise, generating his own percussive beats to underscore the visual motifs. There's a hint of Viennese found-footage turntablism at work here -- Peter Tscherkassky and Martin Arnold are obvious points of comparison -- but Effie is working with a freer hand, producing a scuzzier, more intuitive impact. Above all, Electric Love is, well, electric, engaging the viewer with high-key, blown out colors that push the images into nearly total abstraction. In many cases, the swoop of an arm or the billowing downward jump of a woman's kimono is all that is left to signal that any representational image was ever there. Like true ninjas, they have all vanished into the painterly mist.

The other film that was new to me was Calder for Peter from 2017. Commissioned as part of a suite of films about the work of Alexander Calder (other filmmakers involved in the project included Rosa Barba, Lucy Raven, and Agnès Varda), Asili took the opportunity to make a film in a manner quite different than his usual method. In fact, he adopted some of the approaches -- tripod shots, relatively deep focus -- associated with his late friend and mentor, Peter Hutton, to whom the film is dedicated.

Going to the Storm King Art Center, Effie shot one of the last stabiles Calder made before his death, "Five Swords." We see the sculpture in fragments and from various angles; we see the Calder in the distance, bright red against the bold green field, and in some shots Asili moves us so close up that the frame is filled with the rivets holding the piece together. In several shots we see parts of the Calder silhouetted against a blue sky, clouds moving across the screen. And toward the end of the film, Asili returns to Hudson, NY, with shots of trains and warehouses in the snow.

Calder for Peter is assembled much like certain specific Hutton films, such as In Titan's Goblet (1991) and Skagafjordur (2004). Asili constructs the sculpture and the space around it cubistically, creating a variety of foreground / background relationships in the process. But above all, one gets the sense of harnessed time, a sort of document of compression that shows all the positions and perspectives that the filmmaker has assumed relative to the object at the heart of the project. In a literal sense, that object is the Calder stabile, "Filve Swords." But more broadly, the film's subject is Hutton himself, and Calder for Peter provides an overwhelming impression that for Asili, his late friend could indeed be viewed from every available angle and you still wouldn't have come close to exhausting his significance or wonder.