Two Recent Short Films: Going Home Again (Patreon)

Signal 8 (Simon Liu, 2019)

Simon Liu's films are characterized by a tactility that lands somewhere between the grungy and the ethereal, which perhaps has to do with the unique qualities of one of his favored subjects -- Hong Kong. A city of contrasts, to be sure, so much of Hong Kong is awash in glowing neon and held together by the hard, polished surfaces of capital. And yet, turn a corner and you find the grotty mechanisms that keep such a system afloat. Physical congestion, along with Hong Kong's complex colonial legacy, result in a bustling, hybridized space that retains much of the urban poetry, as well as the struggle, that most western cities have gentrified completely out of sight.

Signal 8 is a dense city symphony, composed with a variable time signature. In its faster movements, the film employs high-speed digital effects to heighten the hyper-bustle of the city into a hazy abstraction. But the slower sections luxuriate in the light qualities, the sea greens, warm ambers, and electric rose colors of the street ambiance. As beautiful as Signal 8 is, there is a sense of anxiety behind Liu's gaze. This comes as no surprise. While there is nothing in this film that alludes to the Chinese government's recent crackdown on Hong Kong's democracy movement, one can almost perceive a desire on Liu's part to document as much of this place as possible, lest it change forever.

Tape 39 (Amit Dutta, 2020)

Dutta's latest short film is a fragment, a part of a larger, never-completed work that the filmmaker has returned to after many years. As Dutta explains in the narration, he has gone back to this fragment -- the titular tape 39 out of dozens -- because he thinks it might hold the clues to certain mysteries that plague him. On the one hand, this includes figuring out why he was unable to complete the commissioned work, a documentary about Gond artist Jangarh Singh Shyam. But perhaps more importantly, Dutta hopes to perhaps discover the deeper mystery of why, at the height of his success at the age of 39, Jangarh hanged himself in a Japanese museum.

The film, which is slyly presented as if it were the mostly-unedited contents of tape 39, is broken up with title cards made to resemble a researcher's note cards or entries from a card catalog. The film records Dutta's trip from the city of Bhopal to Jangarh's home village of Patangarh, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. In a sense, Dutta is reversing Jangarh's own journey from small-town life to national and international renown, almost as if performing a symbolic "return" of the artist's body whence it came. 

We don't see a great deal of Jangarh's artwork, in part because Dutta assumes an audience that is rather familiar with it. I got the vague sense that Jangarh's position in Indian art is a bit like that of Jean-Michel Basquiat, someone held up as a daring "primitive" and fetishized as the toast of the high-art world, to his own detriment. What I do not know about Jangarh, however, Dutta's lovely film certainly encourages me to find out.