NYFF Currents (Short Takes 4) (Patreon)

Ekphrasis (Riccardo Giacconi, 2019)

"Ekphrasis" is a term from classical art history, and it means the detailed description of the contents of an image. It was one of the key principles of art writing in Vasari's day since, of course, there were no reproductions to be placed alongside a written analysis of a work of art. The writer had to provide a "verbal picture" of the artwork itself before any meaningful analysis could occur. In Giacconi's piece, the filmmaker quickly flits over a number of media images related to German and Italian fascism, both historical and contemporary. Usually the narrator's description matches what we see, but occasionally there is a discrepancy.

Apart from the fact of the various images' content, the only real political intervention in Ekphrasis seems to be the withholding of anything resembling a political intervention. That's to say, the descriptions are so painfully factual and anodyne as to force the issue: why are we listening to these narrative explications that seem intent on telling us next to nothing? Likewise, Giacconi's fragmentation of the individual images occludes more than it reveals. So the entire project is like a kind of Bizarro-Farocki, where film processes still images in order to subject them to anti-analysis, making them mean less than they would in their unadulterated state. A rather worthless conceptual gambit, at the end of the day.

Trust Study #1 (Shobun Baile, 2020)

One of only two silent films in the entire Currents lineup (the Ute Aurand film being the other), Baile's Trust Study #1 is nevertheless quite discursive, providing the back-and-forth dialogue between the filmmaker and an anonymous interview subject, in the form of onscreen text in both English and Urdu. The film represents a complex play on the notion of "trust," and specifically examines the slippage in meanings between finance and personal confidence. The interview subject worked as a hawaladar, an agent who sent money between various parties through Pakistan and the surrounding nations using long-established but highly unofficial means. 

Hawala is a banking system that exists parallel to the dominant channels of global finance, and after 9/11, the U.S. government began cracking down on hawala, on the assumption that any such transfers must represent the movement of terrorist monies. Trust Study #1 gradually explains its own visual status as a film, since we discover that the unexplained images that accompany the text are in fact fragments of a hawala banking code. But perhaps more fascinating is the push and pull between Baile and his subject. The former hawaladar is always circumspect, trying to figure out how much to say and what to keep to himself. So the viewer is implicated in a network of highly mitigated trust.

Letter From Your Far-off Country (Suneil Sanzgiri, 2020)

Like Melisa Liebenthal's Aquí y allá, Suneil Sanzgiri's film Letter From Your Far-off Country has a few toes in the "desktop cinema" mode, drawing a fair amount of material from Google Earth, Maps, and (in Sanzgiri's case) images of SMS communications shot right from the filmmaker's phone. And, like Liebenthal, Sanzgiri is exploring his own family history, connecting it to broader social and political events in the country of his birth. Letter takes its title from a poem by Kashmiri-American writer Agha Shahid Ali, and it is about the personal, even bodily toll taken by the experience of diaspora. (Ali's poem includes a line about itinerant workers keeping their addresses in their pockets, so at least their bodies could make it back home.) 

As with Sanzgiri's previous work At Home But Not At Home, the heart of Letter consists of an interview with the filmmaker's father, which serves as a grounding refrain. Various intellectual strains weave in and out, many having to do with the suppression of India's Communist Party, the official rewriting of the history of social unrest in the nation as well as the role of leftism in "parallel cinema," and the legacy of anti-caste reformer B. R. Ambedkar -- himself the subject of academic study by a distant relative of the filmmaker, Prof. Prabhakar Sanzgiri. Although Letter never mentions Narendra Modi by name (it doesn't have to), its brief but complex genealogy of dissent is positioned against the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act. Although one would certainly appreciate seeing Sanzgiri articulate these various ideas at more length, Letter provides a visceral portrait of the race of thoughts one experiences when in the throes of rising tyranny.

Once Removed (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2019)

A work that owes a little something to Omer Fast (and superficially resembles Abu Hamdan's earlier Walled Unwalled), Once Removed is essentially a gallery installation that was barely reconfigured for single-channel presentation. And even under those circumstances, it's hard to consider the work much of a success. It is build around an extended interview with Bassel Abi Chahine, a a young man who relates his memories of the Lebanese Civil War and his time as a Communist guerrilla fighter. Thing is, all of this happened before he was born. He is convinced he is the reincarnation of said guerrilla fighter, and that he has clear factual memories from that previous life.

This is potentially interesting, but Abu Hamdan exhibits very little care in composing the piece visually (aside from utilizing two slide-screen images) or articulating the conversation for clarity or even emotional impact. In fact, it takes about ten minutes to even figure out what Chahine is talking about or what is at stake in his claims. In the final moments, we learn that the civil war period is officially verboten in Lebanese politics, and that various atrocities have been covered up -- ones that Chahine both "remembers" and for which he has collected evidence from (other) former soldiers. But apart from the fact of this, we learn almost nothing. 

Single Copy (Hsu Che-Yu, 2019)

This Taiwanese film is a portrait of Chang Chung-I, the surviving brother from a pair of conjoined twins who were separated in 1979 on live television, making them into temporary media stars. Single Copy fixates on a silicone mold that was taken of the boys' body, and implicitly compares this with a 3D digital capture of Chung-I's body as an adult. The film is fragmented and a bit random, not always particularly easy to follow. In truth, it's not especially strong filmmaking. Hsu seems to be banking all his chips on the inherent interest value of his subject, but even that gets a bit lost in the muddle.

This Day Won't Last (Mouaad el Salem, 2020)

The title of el Salem's autobiographical video echoes the Western promise "it gets better," although it perhaps conveys a set of changes less personal than social, even revolutionary. This is appropriate, since el Salem is Tunisian, and in Tunisia, homosexuality remains illegal under Article 230 -- an edict left over from the days of French colonialism. While el Salem states that some of his queer friends have left the country over the years, he refuses to abandon his beloved homeland. And why should he? This Day Won't Last doesn't just insist on the dignity of queer Arab lives. It reminds those who've forgotten that lesbians and gays were part of the revolution that liberated Tunisia in the first place.

This is a very special film, one that recalls the personal collage works of Sadie Benning. Part documentary, part diary, it combines a tone of sotto voce secrecy and brash defiance. El Salem makes the video with the knowledge that his family cannot know about his gay identity. And while there is palpable fear on display, there isn't an iota of shame. This Day Won't Last begins from the first-person position but articulates its maker's place within a community, a movement, and a nation. Telling the story of a mighty fig tree that was transplanted when it became inconvenient, el Salem makes his stand. Despite the fact that his country does not yet officially embrace him, he fully embraces his country.

While Cursed By Specters (Burak Çevik, 2020)

Simple and elegant, Çevik's newest film is a formalist tribute to Straub / Huillet's 1984 film Class Relations, their adaption of Kafka's Amerika. Employing a strategy that recalls both James Benning and Morgan Fisher (especially his masterpiece ( ) ), Çevik (re)produces the various shots within the Straub / Huillet film that have no direct human presence. So we see landscapes and cityscapes emptied of all but moving vehicles -- the suggestion of figures unseen. We see doors as they open, and then as they shut. We witness the occasional shadow. And of course, we see depopulated compositions with offscreen voices, the crystalline clarity of the cinematography offset by the vulgarity of human business. This method allows the stark physicality of Straub / Huillet's cinema to assert itself. The mostly-still scenes are like gelatin-silver prints, Teutonic in their plainspoken constructivism. You learn something about the film, its makers, and, well, Cinema.