Two Films by Manuela de Laborde (Patreon)

In 2016, Mexican filmmaker Manuela de Laborde released what was probably that year's most acclaimed experimental film. As Without So Within is a nearly 30 minute long abstract study in color and volume, featuring several distinct movements organized around a particular type of form. These are mostly geometrical solids -- spheres, cones, etc. -- that de Laborde photographs under varying conditions of moving light. The shifting of the light sources not only generate pictorial forms that appear to mutate. The contact between light and film produces a number of different grain textures which, when combined with the various colors of the objects, results in a gradually evolving optical experience, not so dissimilar from Nathaniel Dorsky's early sand-shifting film Alaya.

When I first say As Without, I didn't really understand what de Laborde was going for. This was probably the result of my having seen it on a video screener rather than its intended celluloid format. But this happens to me sometimes. Confronted with a film that operates outside my own sense of formal possibilities, I misjudge the work, and it takes some time (and many repeat viewings) for me to discover what was, in fact, plain as day to so many other people. I now consider As Without to be one of the very best films of the last decade.

It's because I botched it so profoundly with As Without that I have been somewhat reticent to write about de Laborde's two most recent films. Again, I have been watching them on screeners rather than projected film, and this means that I am undoubtedly missing a lot of the nuances that make de Laborde's work special. Nevertheless, I do feel that I have a much better grasp of what she is up to as a filmmaker, and given that I like both of these films very much, I decided I would take a chance and articulate my (preliminary) responses to them.

Azucar y Saliva y Vapor (Sugar and Spit and Sand) (2020)

This is a 15 minute film composed of three distinct parts. The first part (about nine minutes) appears to be a single lateral tracking shot, moving left to right over an ever-changing set of deep red and purple organic forms. There is a quality to the imagery that makes it resemble a collision between oil and water, with lighter and darker laps of liquid arrested in motion. It is a challenge to grasp these purely non-representational entities, although sometimes they look like close-ups of body parts, other times some kind of manipulated aerial shot of the ocean and the beach. The soundtrack starts out as an undulating droning sound, but finally gives way to a drum-propelled bit of rock music. 

One might reasonably expect de Laborde to spend all 15 minutes on this simple but intriguing assemblage of bulbous shapes, but at the nine minute mark, she cuts to a four-minute static shot of thick foliage, shown in black-and-white. At first it looks like a still photo, but in time we see the plants trembling and pulsating in the wind, creating the impression of a breathing organism. This visual sensation goes hand in hand with the plants themselves, which look like cactus flowers of some sort, but resemble nothing so much as clumps of protruding vulvae, all stippled with close-shaved pubic hair. This gives way to the film's coda, a brief shot of a woman in shadows, cutting a spiral shape out of a piece of white paper.

The title of de Laborde's film, Sugar and Spit and Steam, mirrors the oozing, unbounded shapes that comprise most of the film. Despite the almost complete abstraction of the first part, its connection to the second retroactively implies a kind of distant looking, contrasted with the tremulous medium close-up of the plant life. In this regard, the coda could be seen as a metaphor for the entire film's procedure, turning a uniform, rectilinear space (the paper, the film frame) into a kind of vortex. This is a film of moisture and viscosity, an example of haptic cinema that disorients and then eventually seduces its spectator.

Ficciónes (2021)

Like many of the classic structural films, de Laborde's Ficciónes gradually instructs its viewer how to watch it. But unlike most of those films, Ficciónes initially conveys an improvisational tone, the sense that its maker is responding to the visual stimuli she's discovering in front of her. While this isn't necessarily wrong, it doesn't fully account for the strict organization of the film, one that subtly plays against the fuzzy contours of its dominant forms.

It's a palindrome, essentially, although one could certainly be forgiven for not recognizing this on a single viewing. De Laborde has two basic types of material in the film -- rock formations on a forest floor, and foliage silhouetted against the sky -- and subjects that material to a set of permutations that focuses our attention on shape, camera movement, and above all, the anxious swirl of film grain.

Ficciónes opens with a small image centered in the frame, seemingly the result of a projected image being rephotographed from the screen. It consists of blue and white forms, fading in and out, the camera moving slowly around them. Sometimes they look like tree branches; other times, curved slices of wood produced with a jigsaw. There is a minimalist soundtrack of a couple of alternating tones, sort of like radar pings. This recalls Michael Snow's electronic score for La Région Centrale, and the allusion is confirmed by the wild movement of the camera in subsequent sections.

De Laborde shows us what appear to be large rock shapes laid out on the craggy ground, but they are not rocks in the usual sense. Their existence tells us they were made by human hands. These shapes -- a swollen hand, a snakelike formation, a rounded scallop -- resemble pieces of a children's puzzle. At first, de Laborde photographs them in various hues, using staggered superimposition to produce a juddering effect (much like that seen in Sugar and Spit and Steam). Forms wobble and decompose, and this is echoed by a flange in the soundtrack.

In the next section, we see these forms a bit more clearly, and de Laborde's curlicue camerawork seems to confirm the earlier Snow reference. As this section progresses, the filmmaker uses negative space to blot out the object-forms, with the black shapes bobbling atop their corresponding positive images like floating censor bars. From here, a new part emerges, layering these images with, again, clearer shots of the earlier foliage (now an unambiguous green). De Laborde repeats the small frame / large frame superimposition, this time with the leaves remaining static while the rock-forms twist and whirl in the background.

As Ficciónes proceeds, de Laborde shows us the two types of imagery in various permutations: still and moving; large and small; blurry and hard-edged; positive and negative. The film appears to end with a small-frame shot of the stone-forms, now clearly some kind of objects on the ground -- similar to the rough landscapes of La Région Centrale. But as with her previous film, de Laborde offers a coda that seems to summarize the project's overall point of view. We see the highly pronounced form of a plant with thin leaves, the sort that Brakhage once affixed to clear celluloid in Mothlight. This once-living object, de Laborde shows us, lives anew in the world of the film, shaking and twitching against a peach-colored background of film grain.

Although Ficciónes is just the Spanish-language word for "fictions," it also immediately calls to mind the classic collection by Jorge Luis Borges, which contained many of the author's greatest works. ("The Library of Babel," "The Garden of Forking Paths," "The Circular Ruins," "Pierre Menard," etc.) De Laborde's film, of course, is a "fiction" in the original sense: a thing that has been fashioned by human hands. But de Laborde's Ficciónes also applies a Borges-like game-playing approach to the visual field. When we see things from close up, we perceived the space they occupy, but their contours become hard to discern. From far away, shapes are clearer, but the material stuff that comprises them (color, texture, grain) disappears. But combining, separating, and overlapping these elements, Ficciónes provides us a systematic catalog of the way things are, but this plurality of views brings us no closer to objective truth.