The Big Experimental Run-Down (Part One) (Patreon)

Despite the fact that avant-garde film and video are sort of my bailiwick, I've been spending much of my time on this Patreon focusing on feature-length narratives. This is mostly due to laziness; really digging into experimental films is more difficult and requires more concentration that I've had lately. With this in mind, I want to go back and address some of the more impressive experimental films I've seen over the last few months.

A Woman in Trouble is a Temporary Thing (Karen Yasinsky, 2020)

For years now, I've been following Yasinsky's work and she had always struck me as (in Sarris's terms) a subject for future study. Much like her fellow Baltimorean Stephanie Barber, Yasinsky makes works that are undeniably tangible but somehow unspecific, alluding to moods and gestures without lighting on content that one could pin down. The films project a feminist aura, suggesting inchoate forms of women's subjectivity, but they are also just likely to regard a given person as a hapless receptacle of human folly.

A Woman in Trouble is a Temporary Thing seems to borrow its title (with some adjustment for age) from Romeo Void's 1984 song "A Girl in Trouble (is a Temporary Thing)," and although this hardly explains Yasinsky's short film, it does draw comparisons with the song's ambiance of emotional menace. This is essentially a portrait film, the camera consistently trained on a young white woman with dark hair, apparently having a conversation at a party with an unseen interlocutor. Only in one shot does Yasinsky break away from her human subject: a slow-motion scene of a horse rolling around in a field is overlaid with an animated spiderweb in the process of coming apart.

While the horse is slowed down, the woman is slightly sped up, lending her actions a hint of agitation. As she continues talking (on the image only; the film is silent), small white spheres begin entering the frame from the left and bouncing off her face. She in no way acknowledges this inscrutable situation, and as we watch these objects hit her, we recognize that they don't obey the usual laws of gravity. They speed up, reverse course, and ricochet off her cheek or lip with minimal impact. The woman's "trouble," it seems, is that she is trying to connect with the world around her while being pelted with pieces of Kix cereal, an assault that even she cannot entirely recognize. It could be a metaphor for, say, social anxiety. But in Yasinsky's realm, it's also a strictly formal dilemma. 

Neko (Maximilien Luc Procter, 2021)

Max, better known on the web as +MLP+, is an incredibly prolific filmmaker, someone who truly uses the medium of cinema as a way to explore his surroundings and explore the sensual potential of seemingly ordinary phenomena. And I honestly don't think it's just that I'm a cat person, or that I recently lost a beloved feline by the name of Neko, although I also wouldn't presume to feign objectivity. But all of that aside, I see Neko as a bit of a breakthrough in MLP's work. There is a complex structural play that gives this film a bit more shape and follow-through than some of his previous films, and this has a lot to do with Max's use of multiple registers of imagery.

The film begins a bit like a "cat video," with a close-up of a brown-gray tabby in mid-meow. Then, we see slightly faded wall projections of super-8 footage, most likely edited in-camera. Short, pulsating shots of trees and water in a garden or park appear in split-screen, or with the filmmaker using mirrors and other reflective surfaces to create frames within the frame. From there, we move indoors, where a swatch of carpet is the frame of reference for the cat / human activity. Fast-motion play is layered, its color manipulated, to turn these casual shots into a layered, multifaceted window of dueling perspectives and volumes. 

As we go back to the super-8 material, we see a black-and-white cat on stairs outside, in what appears to be footage shot abroad. Cats are cats the world over, but this one displays the intelligence to interact with the cameraman and his friend, and then go on his merry way. This reminded me of the scenes one sees from Turkey, where stray cats have developed their own symbiotic street culture. The sunlight in this shot is rendered in yellow and purple, and as Proctor cuts back to the "normal" shots of the house cat, the contrast is jarring. The film ends with a shot of hazy amber forms, the play of sunlight on an interior window (I think), bringing the interaction between interior and exterior to a logical conclusion. Neko more than once made me think of the films of Stephen Broomer and Dan Browne, which is meant as high praise.

Bodies in Dissent (Ufuoma Essi, 2021)

A film that was featured in the Prismatic Fields festival but that I missed, Bodies in Dissent operates within certain identifiable avant-garde traditions -- the portrait film, the landscape film, the dance film -- but differs significantly from all of them. Comprised of multiple, almost cubist perspectives of a woman (Nambi Kiyira) referred to in the credits as "the convert." She is dressed in black, positioned in a forest clearing, or sometimes an empty field, Bodies in Dissent creates a mutable environment that is anchored by the performer, her gaze and her charisma. 

The soundtrack features dramatic piano music, along with a narrator who speaks of a frenzied ritual that is engulfing its participants more and more profoundly. As we listen, we see the woman dance, pose, and gesture in the clearing, producing forceful shapes with her body and asserting its contrast with the surrounding green. Essi begins fragmenting the woman, giving us close-ups of her extended hands or the back of her head. Against this primary motif, the filmmaker introduces internally framed images of a modern dancer, some jazz musicians, and flickers of foliage. Essi's film recalls Ja'Tovia Gary's The Giverny Document, in that it adopts certain Romantic or Impressionist tropes in order to bring them into conversation with those aspects of Black high culture that, in fact, helped influence those European movements in the first place.