NYFF Currents (Short Takes 2) (Patreon)

Humongous (Aya Kawazoe, 2020)

One of this year's stealthier entries in the NYFF Currents short film series, Humongous looks like it might be a mere narrative doodle, but is actually much more. A lithe tone poem about a young woman's somewhat dispersed subject development, Aya Kawazoe's film might have benefited from being programmed a bit closer to Laida Lertxundi's Autoficción, a work that Humongous resembles in certain respects. Aya tends to compartmentalize otherwise mundane events through a highly fragmented mode of composition and montage, so that we are seeing children's games from extremely low angles, observing bodies from on high, and watching people and things move through an Ozu-like maze of spatial barriers. The end result is a film that exhibits a significant degree of rigor, but is nonetheless open and casual, like a visualized sequence of observational daydreams. Aya clearly values texture over concrete meaning, and this lends Humongous an admirable subtlety and richness. The title, it seems, is oddly ironic. This is a paean to small, half-remembered things.

In Sudden Darkness (Tayler Montague, 2020)

I suppose this is technically a "calling card," but Montague's debut film is open-ended enough that it seems to announce its maker as an auteur first and foremost, someone with an interest in time, place, and environment. A brief story about a family in New York coping with the massive 2003 blackout, In Sudden Darkness is a bit over-emphatic in its opening moments, as an early confrontation between the main couple (Raven Goodwin and Marcus Callender) feels a bit declarative, underscoring the latent power dynamics in the relationship. But from there, things loosen up and become more atmospheric, with the only real "event" in the film happening offscreen, its causes and possible repercussions left teasingly undefined. Overall, one senses that Montague has one foot in observational realism, another in a more stylized approach to depicting Black life, and it will be interesting to see how these divergent tendencies evolve in her future efforts.

The Unseen River (Phạm Ngọc Lân, 2020)

A fairly mediocre opening salvo from a young Vietnamese director, The Unseen River toggles between two different elliptical tales, never articulating their relationship to one another. In one, a middle-aged woman re-encounters the fisherman with whom she had a love affair earlier in life, before marrying someone else. In this story, Pham focuses quite a lot on the fisherman's black-and-white dog, Piebald. In the other story, a young couple seek help from a monk, because the young man is having trouble sleeping. This leads to conversations between the couple and the monk about the role of the spiritual in daily life. There is a warmed-over Apichatpong feeling to the entire enterprise, and Pham, a cinematographer, has turned in a film that, ironically enough, seems rather cavalierly shot. The framings achieved by the roving camera are fairly negligible.

August 22, This Year (Graham Foy, 2020)

Foy, it seems, has already produced a number of shorts under the nom de film of Fantavious Fritz. He has wisely abandoned this moniker, and there is a similar sense of seriousness behind August 22. It's a placid, narrator-driven riff on the end of the world foretold, a slow grind toward a given date when everybody knows, somehow, that it's all over. The result is a rather depressive, post-millennial version of Christopher Maclaine's The End, notable mostly for its stock-still camerawork (usually) and its use of written description to explain away virtually everything we see onscreen. 

In fact, this is the film that made me realize that we are currently in the throes of a new, post-movement kind of youth cinema, one that offers a sequence of views of things, barely connected, in much the same way that one reads panels in a comic book. Usually, there is a narrator how guides us through these galleries of still panels of non-activity, which are there to signify an act or event, rather than to actually show it unfolding. It's somewhere between the ideograms that comprise Eisenstein's films, and the cyclical action-inserts that replace the alphabet in Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma. This is one of those films, and the most notable practitioners of this new style are Ricky D'Ambrose and Sofia Bohdanowicz. 

Tell me, children. What does it all mean?

Shots in the Dark With David Godlis (Noah Kloster and Lewie Kloster, 2020)

A seven-minute documentary is going to be fairly limited, and so this film is virtually destined to serve as Sundance Channel bumper material. Then again, it poses an interesting question. If there's a notable cultural figure whose story can be summed up in seven minutes, shouldn't that be the form their documentary takes? (Think of all the painful 80-minute slogs we've had to sit through, on much less deserving subjects.) The Klosters whip us up into the life of photographer Godlis, show us his work and method, and present most of his iconic images from the Bowery nightlife of the 1970s. It's breezy, informative, undemanding, and over before you know it. Kinda like CBGBs.