NYFF Currents (Short Takes 1) (Patreon)

King of Sanwi (Akosua Adoma Owusu, 2020)

Conceived as a follow-up to her 2019 film Pelourinho, They Don't Really Care About Us, which explored the appropriation of Michael Jackson as an emblem of defiance by indigenous Brazilians, King of Sanwi briefly surveys Jackson's engagements with various African cultures over the course of his career, from an early trip to Senegal with the Jackson 5, to an eventual ceremony in 1992 during which he was crowned an Ivorian king. Owusu combines stock footage with printed animations that suggest traditional African batik techniques, as though masks and other designs were stenciled directly onto the celluloid. 

Her editing suggests that while Jackson clearly adopted certain elements of African dance and culture for his own work as a Western pop icon, that the exchange was recognized as sincere and mutual -- that, much like Muhammad Ali, Jackson's global triumphs became a symbol of pride for African peoples, as well as Blacks the world over. While Pelourinho seemed to evince a degree of ambivalence about Jackson's legacy, Sanwi seems more straightforward as a celebration of Jackson's artistry, as if to suggest that one need not condone Jackson's personal behavior in order to respect his achievements. 

And you know what? Maybe this is okay. I'm not sure where I personally come down on this issue, but if Cineaste Magazine can feature the new Roman Polanski film on its cover -- a film that doesn't even have an American distributor -- than it's probably not up to White people to litigate Michael Jackson.

Extractions (Thirza Cuthand, 2019)

Cuthand's recent films have adopted a direct mode of address that is pitched somewhere between diary and essay. This conversational tone suits her work quite well, since it serves to elaborate the personal stakes of her politics while also providing her the room to articulate confusion, doubt, and at times her own sense of culpability. In Extractions, Cuthand draws parallels between corporate resource extraction (mining, oil drilling, the lumber industry) and Canada's history of removing First Peoples' children from their homes and placing them with White families. As Cuthand explains, the excuses for expropriating these children, another form of "extraction," have always been about poverty or poor opportunity, conditions that the Canadian state itself perpetuated. So in a way, the government has facilitated this "pipeline" of Native babies to White Canada, just as surely as it facilitates physical pipelines across Native soil.

Extractions personalizes this issue by framing it within Cuthand's own experience of fertility treatments and IVF. As a queer Native woman, she is conflicted, because she wants to have a baby but she is aware that she and her potential child are vulnerable to federal and provincial forces that she them both as less-than. So in a way, despite its conversational tone, this video is a bit like a testimony or even a legal document, the sort that someone makes before going to a potentially violent protest or a war zone. Cuthand is clarifying her anxieties beforehand, so that we will all know that she was invested in protecting her child from before the beginning.

Glimpses From a Visit to Orkney in Summer 1995 (Ute Aurand, 2020)

The inclusion of a new film by Aurand in this year's lineup was a bit of a surprise, since her work skews a little formalist / "old guard" for this group of programmers. Unlike pervious Aurand films, this one has a bit of outside funding behind it, since it is partially a portrait of Scottish artist Margaret Tait, whose centennial is being observed this year. This might have put Glimpses on the programmers' radar, and for that we can be glad. This film is also distinct from other Aurand efforts I've seen in that it includes a title card, suggesting a closure that is somewhat at odds with the open-ended nature of her expansive filmography.

This is a lovely film nevertheless, and exhibits warm notes of the Gregory Markopoulos style. Markopoulos, the mentor of Aurand's good friend Robert Beavers, often combines short bursts of imagery with passages of pure color, and we see this in Glimpses, a new approach for Aurand. Short shots of the Scottish landscape, Tait's home, or the artist herself, punctuate an overall suite of mutating autumnal color fields, whose provenance is uncertain. Are these generated by focusing on some object in nature, by exposing the film directly to available light, or created through lab work? It is hard to tell, but the gradual adjustment of these tones lends them a distinctly organic feeling, as though Aurand were simply documenting a natural occurrence that drifts alongside human activity.

-force- (Simon Liu and Jennie MaryTai Liu, 2020)

If you happen to be familiar with the sensuous, layered 16mm films of Simon Liu, -force- will be particularly interesting to you, because it so clearly demonstrates the work of a known artist working in an unusual new vein. Simon's cityscapes and atmospheric images, often darkly lit and fragmented, tend to provide a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Hong Kong, a bevy of activity and a zone of increased uncertainty. This aspect of Liu's work has, of course, only gotten more pronounced since the Mainland government's crackdown, and his recent Happy Valley is perhaps his darkest film to date.

But -force- combines this approach with computer animation and high-key color coding, to produce a disembodied techno-consciousness that appears to be mediating what we see and hear. A mechanized woman's voice gives us orders, telling us to "please stop all prohibited movement," and that we "are moving out of line." There are repeated statements that "29 stations require cleaning," and although it's unclear what that means, it certainly implies a human purge more than it does sanitation. The overriding sense one gets from -force- is that Hong Kong, as typically visualized by Simon Liu's cinema, has been taken over by an occupying entity, overlaid and made unrecognizable. Metaphors don't get much more apposite.

ADDENDUM: Originally, this review attributed the computer animation segments of this film to Jennie Liu. However, the estimable Phil Coldiron has informed me that in fact, Simon was responsible for the digital animation in this film. Wow! I was so completely wrong! Thanks for the correction, Phil.