Cinetracts '20 (various filmmakers, 2020) (Patreon)

Omnibus films. We all have traumatic memories of them. Do you remember where you where when you saw 11'09"01, the cosmically atrocious international gang-bang intended to pay homage to the memory of 9/11? While some people experienced that disaster collectively, in a film festival setting, I saw it after the fact on a screener, but the impact was still fairly gutting. I'll never forget Alejandro González Iñarrítu's percussive flicker film showing bodies dropping off the Twin Towers, or Sean Penn's mawkish one-act play featuring Ernest Borgnine as a fellow whose dingy apartment finally got a bit of sun once those pesky buildings fell down.

Okay, most collective-effort projects aren't anywhere as tone-deaf as that one. But even the least offensive omnibuses ("omnibi"?) tend to be dragged down to the level of their worst contribution, rather than elevated to the heights of their best. This is due, in part, to what we might call the Law of Awfulness -- suckage rubs off in way that quality, sadly, does not. 

But it's also because in most cases, when one or two short works stand out in an omnibus, they have a way of circulating on their own. Few people recall that Guy Maddin's masterpiece The Heart of the World was part of a series of Canadian shorts made to hono(u)r the 25th anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival. Even fewer recall that there were similar entries by the likes of Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema, and Anne Wheeler. Likewise, the above-average Chacun son Cinema, commissioned for Cannes' 60th, is probably best remembered for the Coen brothers' World Cinema, a sort of "bonus track" to No Country For Old Men which finds Josh Brolin's Llewellen Moss going to a Santa Monica theater and seeing a Nuri Bilge Ceylan film. (As it happens, David Cronenberg delivered fine contributions to both of the above projects, so if you're producing one, he's money in the bank.)

Cinetracts '20, commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts, is a brisk 45 minutes, since each of the contributors was asked to keep their pieces limited to two minutes. This is a stipulation adapted from the original Cinetracts, produced during May '68 by the likes of Godard, Marker, and Resnais. In addition to brevity, the films are supposed to use only sounds native to the images (or can be silent), and are to be restricted to a single geographic locale. As the opening title card explains, the project was proposed in part because of the 2020 election, and the assumption that it would be a tumultuous year. The global pandemic was, of course, an unexpected complication that nevertheless yielded poignant, often painful results.

There are 19 films in total; one assigned artist was unable to complete her contribution. Overall, Cinetracts '20 is an exceptional collection, with several outstanding entries, a genrally high level of artistic accomplishment throughout, and only one outright dud. This is partly due to the horror and mayhem of the year 2020, but it's also largely to the credit of the Wexner's film and video programming team -- David Filipi, Jennifer Lange, and Chris Stults -- whose selection of artists is both diverse and remarkably coherent. Narrative filmmakers tend to work in a more experimental vein, while some experimentalists employ documentary approaches, all of which provides a variety of textures without seeming utterly random. These are works of witness, and that is a concept that takes many forms here.

The strongest contributions, for the most part, are the poetic, allusive ones that embrace the fundamental chasm of representation that 2020's various crises have created. There is no way to depict the toll of COVID-19, or the death of George Floyd, or the coincidence of global lockdown and encroaching fascism. So Cauleen Smith's piece, for example, expands on her recent video work involving floral arrangements, juxtaposing a small material tribute to the dead with the smug sound of governmental indifference. Likewise, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film depicts COVID activism, cross-cut with young children napping in a daycare center. This shows a formal comparison -- active / passive, older / younger -- while also alluding to the reality that healthcare workers and others are separated from their children by circumstance.

But other films are more direct, asking the viewer to consider the ways that particular communities have been affected by the pandemic, in radically unequal ways. Australia's Karrabing Film Collective addresses the Aboriginal health crisis, while Rosine Mbakam compares the official representation of Belgium's national health service -- its images of front-line workers, all European -- with the statistical fact that most of the country's health workers are African immigrants. Bouchra Khalili, meanwhile, provides a brief history of public protests by the French health service, which until recently had been met with riot police. Now, the pandemic has made them "heroes," if only temporarily. And Serbia's Želimir Žilnik employs a lyrical direct-cinema mode to show citizens rummaging through goods at a swap meet, mostly mask-free, and then casting their ballots in a subsequent election, with social distancing procedures in place.

Other filmmakers found topics to address that were pertinent to the year 2020 but were not directly related to the pandemic. Sky Hopinka, for example, considers the history of Canada's Nunavut Day holiday, noting all the utterly unrelated events that have happened on July 9th. This slyly harks back to Ken Loach's 9/11 film, which focused on the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973. But it also emphasizes the lack of Indigenous progress in Canada since Nunavut became a province. Christopher Harris uses Google Earth to track a police call in Chicago, where a Black suspect is being hunted down and quite possibly subjected to excessive force. And Gabriel Mascaro's short film explores the return of the drive-in cinema, but takes the occasion to consider the imbrication of new surveillance technologies with this "retro" form.

The selection also offered me the chance to discover a few filmmakers whose work I was unfamiliar with. Columbus-based artist Cameron Granger, who kicks off the collection, is certainly a talent to watch, turning in a timely mini-document of mediated living. And Nigerian-American writer Akwaeke Emezi's performance / landscape piece is a genuine standout, in part because its relation to the overall theme is so difficult to pin down. But with a project like this, I'd rather be confused than bored. Cinetracts '20 demonstrates that creativity flourishes under constraint . . . or even quarantine.

You can watch Cinetracts '20 here.