NYFF Currents (Short Takes 5) (Patreon)

See You In My Dreams (Shun Ikezoe, 2020)

Neither flesh nor fish, not exactly a narrative short but not particularly avant-garde either. A grainy para-narrative work with shades of Maya Deren (sort of), but a general lack of organization or motility. Images and sounds never assert themselves, as though interior concepts like "dream" and "memory" allow for an overall refusal to engage. Then again, I suspect this is the soft, smeary zone (vaguely "arty" but with no formal rigor) in which a lot of people feel most comfortable.

Hidden (Jafar Panahi, 2020)

Like Sergei Loznitza's A Night at the Opera, Panahi's film was commissioned by the Paris Opera as part of a four-film omnibus. (I looked into the remaining two, and it doesn't look as though we missed much by their exclusion.) As Panahi himself remarks not once but twice in the course of the film, Hidden is kind of a conceptual sequel to his recent 3 Faces, virtually recreating that film in miniature. A friend of Panahi and his daughter is making a film, and has discovered a young girl in a village outside Tehran who has a beautiful singing voice. But the girl's family will not permit her to sing for others because they believe it would attract the lascivious attention of men.

There is nothing particularly earthshaking about Hidden, but there doesn't really need to be. It is another example of Panahi's late "house arrest" style, with the director acting mostly as a conduit (and actual driver) for situations that underscore the prevention of art being created, rather than the creation of art per se. It's a solid contribution to Panahi's corpus of protest cinema, a body of work that I believe will stand as one of the most significant cultural documents of the 21st century.

Apparition (Ismaïl Bahri, 2019)

So many of this year's Currents shorts are openly political in some way, and not all of them match their historical and cultural concerns with the requisite care for the medium in which they're working. Apparition is a simple, lovely exception. Using the most fundamental elements of his working tools -- digital imaging, an object, and light -- Bahri presents a brief consideration of material history and its role in producing memory. Holding up a photograph taken on Tunisia's 1956 day of independence, we see the victory over colonialism appear and recede, its meanings for the present unstable. A stark companion piece to Mouaad el Salem's more passionately digressive This Day Won't Last.

Episodes - Spring 2018 (Mathilde Girard, 2020)

It seems that someone (or someones) on this year's selection committee is very enamored of the diary form. There are many examples, and even some works that don't strictly adhere to the diary-film format seem to operate in a strictly first-person mode, as though the subjectivy behind the camera can serve as the primary organizational principle for the film in question. There are a few films this year that, frankly, don't succeed at all on this basis, most notably See You In My Dreams [discussed above], Malembe, and Notes, Imprints (On Love): Part 1. 

By contrast, Girard's Episodes is a 3rd-person documentary work within the diary tradition, taking a deeply personal look at one's immediate surroundings during a bounded, and in this case turbulent, period of time. I'm not familiar with Girard or her work, but based on the credits, she appears to be affiliated with Valérie Massadian, as well as Charlotte Bayer-Broc, who made 2017's The Blue Devils. Although we are observing the relationships and activities of three different young women, any one of them seems as though she could be Girard herself. Such is the degree of intimacy and spontaneity captured (or staged) by Episodes.

It's an intriguing film, to be sure, but Girard is working in such a different register than virtually every other filmmaker in Currents (at least among the experimental shorts) that I'm not certain Episodes is particularly well served by its presence here. In fact, I find it hard to evaluate Girard's project without seeing more of what she does, to see exactly what she hopes to accomplish with this method. Having said all that, this is impressive stuff, and I look forward to seeing more.

Look Then Below (Ben Rivers, 2019)

While Ben Rivers is often understood to be a cinematic chronicler of land and sea, working mostly in the realist tradition, there has always been a thrumming energy throughout his work, pointing toward the surreal, the uncanny, or even the post-human. Look Then Below, Rivers’ third collaboration with the writer Mark von Schlegell, takes this tendency to its outer reaches. An exploration of the Wookey Hole caves in Somerset, this film infuses recognizable forms – rock, water, and air – with a hallucinatory neon glow. 

It is clear that Rivers is moving into new territory here, engaging in a higher degree of post-production, image layering, and flat-out trippiness than ever before. I applaud this, because as much as I admire the body of work Rivers has amassed over the past fifteen or so years, he may well have taken that approach as far as it could go. Having said that, I think Look Then Below finds the filmmaker still grappling with this new terrain. There is a preponderance of stuff in the film, a sense that Rivers is trying out new strategies. But after two viewings, I had difficulty discerning an overall shape, or even a concrete relationship between the images, sounds, and narration. This is interesting, possibly even exciting, but not quite there yet.

In The Air Tonight (Andrew Norman Wilson, 2020)

Really, this meme, for 11 minutes.

A Revolt Without Images (Pilar Monsell, 2020)

Like many contemporary political documents, Monsell's A Revolt Without Images is a work of reclamation, an attempt to fill a significant gap in the dominant historical record. In this case, the artist offers the viewer a tactile, shadowy cinematic description of a ruin: a municipal granary in Córdoba that dates from before 1652. That is the date when, due to a grain shortage, a group of proto-capitalists decided to take advantage and engineer "a corner in wheat" (cf. D.W. Griffith's 1909 masterwork), controlling the population through starvation. However, the women of Córdoba led a revolt, the men followed, and the robber-barons backed down. The wheat was distributed among the citizens.

The second half of A Revolt Without Images, interestingly, is filled with images. Monsell shows us women of various ages, moving through a museum space, gazing at portraits dating from around the same time as the revolt. These are paintings of women, and although it is highly unlikely that any of those sitters were involved in the rebellion, Monsell's point stands. In the absence of any remaining traces of those who have struggled from below, it is up to us to conjure them in our imagination, with the tools at our disposal.

Point and Line to Plane (Sofia Bohdanowicz, 2020)

One of the most textually dense and emotionally complex films in this year's short film selection, Point and Line to Plane may not be suitable for a "short take." In fact, it's a film that I may return to later since, after two viewings, I am still puzzling out exactly how I feel about it. But there are several things that can be said about it right off the bat.

It is the latest effort in Bohdanowicz's current project, which involves a close collaboration with actor Deragh Campbell. In these films, Bohdanowicz appears to be triangulating biographical explorations through the semi-fictional character Campbell portrays onscreen, generating a bizarre frisson for the spectator. We are being lured with the semiotic cues of intimacy, but strategically held at a distance. This seems to allow Bohdanowicz to work with her own life material as text, to render it semi-objective, which permits her to avoid the confessional, affective pitfalls that trip up artists mining similar seams.

In this regard, Point and Line to Plane takes this tension to a new extreme. This results in a fascinating film that is half digressive essay, half statement of personal mourning, and the halting, formalist tone Bohdanowicz and Campbell adopt throughout the film seem designed to confound the viewer's customary avenues of feeling. We are not asked to sympathize with the film's subject, even while we care about her loss. Nor are we confounded by her intellectual routing of loss through the history of art. (We can imagine some films that might try to cast this type of theoretical engagement as some sort of pathological avoidance.) 

What Bohdanowicz's film actually does is keep us suspended, and by doing so, convey the feeling of suspended time that characterizes mourning, almost transmitting it by convection. We learn about the two friends the subject has lost through the interests and concerns they shared with the subject, which the film opens up to the broader universe -- the different ways of thinking about Kandinsky's nonobjective canvases, the rediscovery of Hilma af Klint, and even the very process of having made the film we are watching. Point and Line to Plane, as the title obliquely suggests, is about a movement, the gesture of connecting entities in space. But there is no guarantee that this connection will form a reassuring, coherent picture.