NYFF Currents (Short Takes 3) (Patreon)

An Arrow Pointing To a Hole (Steve Reinke, 2020)

This is a sufficiently complex work that demands more analysis than I can provide at the moment, unfortunately. I have grown more and more impressed with Reinke as an artist over the past few years, partly because I don't think there's anybody who is doing exactly what he does. His work has a certain diaristic element to it, along with a kind of monologuist / stand-up philosopher tinge. But he is still primarily concerned with the relationship between sounds and images, and in particular how those semiotic forms work to make and unmake various notions of the queer body. Like Mike Hoolboom, and Dani and Sheilah ReStack, Reinke is an artist who is redefining modernism in a post-straight era, one premised on the muddying of the optic / haptic divide.

An Arrow begins with Reinke talking about Nathaniel Dorksy's Arboretum Cycle, and how in his own work, he wanted to show flora as a set of tactile forms that one could penetrate, that could engulf the body. Reinke is offering a kind of immanent critique of Dorsky as an optical artist, someone whose art postulates a remove from the world it depicts, and suggests that this might pose certain problems for an art of queerness. (Dorsky's status as a "queer artist" is always an interesting question, to what extent his life as a gay man is incidental to the work he makes.) 

From there, Reinke goes on to tell a story about the evacuation of his own unconscious, and its replacement by the microbes in his digestive system -- a trade of theoretical psyche for invisible but verifiable gut bacteria. Riffing on this notion, Reinke articulates a multi-pronged conception of human abjection as our most fruitful future, a cognitive map that includes Pig Pen from "Peanuts" and an episteme of flatulence. As is often the case with Reinke's work, there is a delivery that comes across as wide-eyed and awestruck, as though he were discovering threads through various discourses while you watch. He is very good at concealing his cunning. And while much of his material may be bunk, it's hard not to think he may be onto something. (In this regard, Reinke is the polar opposite of Andrew Norman Wilson, who comes across as though he's laying down revelation, and is patently full of shit.)

A Night at the Opera (Sergei Loznitsa, 2020)

This is an unfortunate little film. It's not that it isn't "good," exactly, although compared to Loznitsa's found-footage excavations of the Soviet era, this short subject, depicting various celebrities and political luminaries arriving by limousine at the steps of the Palais Garnier while flashbulbs flash and onlookers shout and wave, is a bit of a trifle. If this were any year other than 2020, A Night at the Opera would be playing at film festivals with their own red carpet events and VIP arrivals. So Loznitsa's film would provide a savvy commentary on the (de)evolution of cultural capital, and the fact that there has been and probably always will be some form of monetized entertainment designated for the elites of a given era.

Without that built-in structural irony, A Night at the Opera falls a bit flat. However, after 15 minutes of arrivals, stargazing, kids proffering bouquets, color guards with raised swords, and all manner of pomp, something kind of amazing happens. Loznitsa draws back the curtain, and we see (and hear) Maria Callas perform "Una voce poco fa" from The Barber of Seville. It is utterly mesmerizing, and is more than enough to justify the remainder of the film. In fact, I'd suggest programmers pair this film with Stephanie Barber's o my homeland, for a double shot o' diva.

Object Lessons, or: What Happened Whitsunday (Ricky D'Ambrose, 2020)

I find myself a bit on the fence about D'Ambrose's latest film. On the one hand, he has so completely mastered his unique style that his films are immediately recognizable, virtually from the first frame. His sense of color, blocking, and organization is so specific to his cinematic universe that he could probably take on the most mundane assignment and infuse it with the twin atmosphere of noirish intrigue and academic inquiry. But on the other hand, Object Lessons feels a bit less exploratory, and considerably less radical, than his last film, The Sky is Clear and Blue Today. 

Whereas that film found D'Ambrose drawing on tangible metaphors from both the lived history of 21st century New York City and its reflection in the world of art, Object Lessons refracts similar concerns through veiled allusions and fictional but plausible scenarios. Pulling together the rise of a National Front-like far-right party in the U.S., a private art collection, a land endowment, and an unsolved murder, D'Ambrose spins a bone-dry tale of an opportunistic politician using a young white girl's death as a way to simultaneously demonize immigrants and vilify out-of-touch liberal elites. And yet Object Lessons, with its slogan borrowed from Goldwater, its Laura Ingraham / Phyllis Schlafly antagonist, and an unseen Soros / Barnes Foundation bogeyman, comes across as hands-off and antiseptic, as though D'Ambrose wasn't sure whether or not to name names. Object Lessons is a fine film, but it feels cordoned off, like if you touched it, it might set off an alarm.

Aquí y allá (Melisa Liebenthal, 2019)

One of a number of examples of desktop cinema in this year's lineup, Aquí y allá is a geo-structural autobiography, wherein the filmmaker uses Google Earth to articulate her own journey, not only between Argentina and Germany (her present home), but also her family's variegated roots. Her father, of German extraction, married her mother, a Chinese woman, while in China working as an academic anthropologist. Liebenthal describes a history of movement and dislocation, distances that defined people's entire lives that can now be "bridged" with the click of a trackpad. Although one immediately thinks of Godard and Gorin's Ici et ailleurs, based on the fundamental premises of Liebenthal's project, this is one of the many films I've seen this year that displays a significant debt to Harun Farocki. I firmly believe that we're going to look back in a few years and have to recognize that his influence on this generation is massive.