The Big Experimental Rundown (Part Two) (Patreon)

ABOVE: a pharmacist working at a Steenbeck

Reach Capacity (Ericka Beckman, 2020)

Much like A Tribe Called Quest, Ericka Beckman has come back years later and still makes the shot. She has not been especially prolific of late, but Reach Capacity goes some ways to perhaps explaining why. This is experimental film as an Arthur Freed production, with careful, visually precise costuming, staging, and location shooting. All of it looks deceptively simple, and it's clear that Beckman and her crew made the most of the empty public areas eventuated by COVID-19. But like a true master, she has returned to her signature style without missing a beat. 

Reach Capacity is a logical extension of Beckman's two best-known works, You the Better (1983) and Cinderella (1986). Part of this, of course, is the artist's return to high-saturation visuals and her unique collaboration with composer Brooke Halpin. Beckman's major films have always been mini-productions involving highly artificial sets and chant-like, didactic songs, as though she were making educational television for children. Here, she is addressing the divide between labor and capital, and specifically the crisis around real estate speculation. The moving cityscape competes with the dark pits of unseen toil, resulting in a modern-day Metropolis. We've seen the Moloch, and it is us.

See for yourself. 

Making a Diagonal with Music (Aura Satz, 2020)

Aura Satz's short experimental documentary would fit very nicely among some of Luke Fowler's recent work. In ten minutes, Satz introduces us to Argentinean electronic composer Beatriz Ferreyra by showing us some of the ins and outs of her artistic process. In the first part of the film, we see Ferreyra moving a door back and forth because it makes a particular creak that fascinates her. She is, in essence, playing an instrument, and Satz continues by showing the composer at her mixing table, integrating the door sound into a collection of other musique concrète she's harvested from the environment. Once at the mixing board, Ferreyra demonstrates the process of spatializing electronic sound, manipulating specific sounds and stereo tracks, so the wave of music will wash over the listener "diagonally," with some parts pivoted away from the ear and other parts hitting directly. A very strong, very modest film.

The Well Prepared Citizen's Solution (Lydia Moyer, 2021)

Lydia Moyer's new film may be one of the only artworks about COVID that we're still looking at in a few years. That's because Well Prepared Citizen is only tangentially about the pandemic, and more about how it threw into dramatic relief certain cultural divides and geographical tendencies. Moyer speaks in the first person throughout the five minute piece. In the first half, we see a number of text phrases presented on different colored screens. Statements like "I'M THE ONLY ONE WHO DOESN'T OWN A GUN" or "WE DON'T EVER WEAR MASKS" clarify Moyer's point. She is a creative leftist who lives in a conservative enclave (in Oregon), and yet she is accepted as belonging to the small community.

Part of this is that she has been there for awhile, and that counts for something. In the second half, we see distorted images of Moyer and the neighborhood, as the filmmaker speaks to us directly. She describes her neighbors as generous with their whisky and their meat from hunting, and at the same time outsiders are looked at with extreme suspicion. Moyer articulates her differences from the people around her, while explaining that COVID has made it clear that she is one of them, and they will be there for her if she's in need. Prioritizing community -- "we take care of our own" -- is essentially a conservative ethos, but that doesn't mean there's no room for an oddball or two.

"The Red Filter is Withdrawn." (Minjung Kim, 2020)

Kim's latest film is, on the most basic level, a landscape study. The filmmaker takes her camera to the seaside, filming from inside caves and man-made oubliettes, producing multiple images of the outside, all surrounded by fields of darkness. This process evokes certain ideas familiar to anyone familiar with film theory, particularly the camera obscura and Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Shafts of light bombard the camera, forming pictures, while large natural formations shroud that image in an impenetrable black. And at times, Kim manipulates the color of the image, using multiple filters to withhold portions of the image from us. (A filter doesn't so much "make" red as it screens out green and blue.)

In the film's second half, we are outside of the caves, but almost immediately we are confronted with headstones, memorial markers, and finally a Korean national cemetery. In Plato, when we exit the cave and look at the real world, our eyes ache but we eventually accept the truth of real things, and leave the shadows behind. But in Red Filter, the emergence from the cave is almost immediately met with death.

Throughout the film, Kim presents subtitles (in Korean and English) that contain excerpts from Hollis Frampton's "A Lecture," in which he discusses the problem of cinema and knowledge. As he explains it, the white rectangle of light offered by an empty projector "contains everything," since there is nothing shaping, blocking or filtering the light. Once a filter is introduced, or for that matter a piece of film (what's the difference?), large segments of light are removed from that white beam. We receive something we call "representation," but at the cost of seeing what is actually there: illumination.

In the end credits, Kim provides a list of the locations she has shown in the film. In every case, we have been looking at hiding places or locations of death. Each dark space corresponds to a Korean military action and those who tried but failed to survive it. If we apply Frampton's theorems to these spaces, we are forced to conclude that cinema, and the society that produced it, are tantamount to death, and that it is survival that is the marvel. Forces are forever shaping humanity, culling it, and every day that we fall through the sieve is merely a stroke of good luck.