Liminal (various directors, 2020) (Patreon)

A four-part omnibus commissioned by Mexico's FICUNAM, Liminal is apparently thematically united by the relationships between film and music. Clearly this is a pretty tenuous connection, since there are umpteen million ways that relationship can be articulated. The end result, as you might expect, has the same middling batting average as most of these cine-Cerberus efforts.

La lumière la lumière (Philippe Grandrieux)

This is probably the most successful individual film in the collection, and if you are temperamentally inclined towards Grandrieux's overall project, you will most likely appreciate it a lot. The filmmaker is working in his usual vein, perhaps interjecting a wisp of extraneous narration into what is basically a work of portraiture. I always feel a little weird about not responding to Grandrieux, and this film, actually, helped clarify it for me. Ostensibly a film of an artist's model given to fits of epilepsy, who is depicted in extremis as she loses herself dancing to Alan Vega and Mark Hurtado's Saturn Drive Duplex, we are to understand that Grandrieux's camera is capturing something beyond subjectivity, a pure somatic reality that is beyond the individual's control. 

There's a bit of Paul Sharits at work here, but some early Garrel too, and it's that French intellectual context that sort of loses me. The narration actually refers to achieving "the formless," so there's no question that Georges Bataille is on Grandrieux's mind, along with Blanchot, Deleuze, and an entire tradition that locates a particular form of (mitigated) truth within the workings of the body. It's a perspective I respect but do not share; my thinking is too German, I guess, to really connect with these ideas. Where Grandrieux sees transcendence, I see only fetish. Nevertheless, I'm not an idiot. I recognize a major filmmaker when I see one.

Azúcar y saliva y vapor / Sugar, saliva and steam (Manuela de Laborde)

It took me some time, and several viewings, to come around and recognize that virtually all of my peers were correct: Manuela de Laborde's 2016 film As Without So Within is a very good film, one of the best experimental films of the last few years in terms of technique, composition, and use of color. More importantly, de Laborde sustains interest over a substantial 25 minute running time, using a subtle musicality to lead us from one abstract passage to the next. I am not sure what I expected from this follow-up, but it was definitely not this. 

I am utterly mystified by this film, not just in terms of how it fits together, but even in the sense of what I was looking at. The tripartite title seems like it might offer a clue, given that Sugar, saliva and steam is composed of three distinct sections. But the first and longest section is an extended left-to-right pan over a set of pale pink forms that looked to me like the cross-sectioned entrails of an animal, bloodless and preserved. As was the case with de Laborde's previous film, I had to watch this on a screener, so perhaps I missed some crucial visual details. But the second section, a nearly still image of some rather yonic looking jungle foliage (above), did not illuminate matters. And the third section, showing someone cutting a spiral from a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 paper, made me wonder whether we had moved onto the next film without my noticing.

The World is Cold (Lav Diaz)

Perfectly lovely but oblique, The World is Cold confirms that Diaz can only accomplish so much in the short form. Despite his novelistic tendencies, he is a director who trades in emblems and avatars more than characters per se, and part of the satisfaction of his long-form cinema is watching as the meanings ascribed to those character-emblems evolve across time and history. (In this regard, Diaz is as much an heir to Glauber Rocha as Lino Brocka.) But a short work like The World is Cold functions more like a sketch for deeper, more suggestive possibilities. Here, a failed musician experiences the alienation of Metro Manila, while his son stokes a small flame for his fading dreams. Lovely, but slight.

Lady Lazaro (Óscar Enriquez)

A debut film by a young Mexican director, Lady Lazaro is the weakest of the bunch, although it shows promise. The film begins with a jarring close-up of the naked vagina of a dead woman, a stark Duchampian visual that starts us on a potentially exploitative foot. How does Enriquez recoup? We see another woman, with a nose piercing and a butch haircut, drag the body from the middle of a cornfield to a clearing. We also see that same woman fail an opera audition, as she is too overcome with emotion to sing the aria. The conclusion of Lady Lazaro pretty much writes itself: the dead woman is the singer's lover, and she performs the aria for her as a final tribute. 

As for the final shot, the title kind of tells you where Enriquez might take things, and he indeed does. I could never quite shake the feeling that a dead gay woman was being used as an aesthetic prop for borrowed profundity, something we see a whole lot in popular culture. But mainly, this is the kind of film-school exercise that looks rather puny next to Grandrieux or Diaz.