Recent Experimental Films: Pirker / Lamas / Szlam (Patreon)

These are significant new films that, for whatever reason, are not coming soon to a theater near you.

Real Time (Sasha Pirker, 2021)

Sasha Pirker is an Austrian filmmaker who has been making work for the past fifteen or so years. But like a number of her compatriots, she has not gotten a great deal of attention from North American film festivals. (I sometimes think this difficulty in breaking through, even for established filmmakers such as Siegfried A. Fruhauf and Dietmar Brehm, may have something to do with the overall success of Sixpack, the Viennese film distributor. They release so much each year that it can be hard combing through it all, so some programmers have stopped trying to do so.) 

Real Time is a smart, compact gem that exhibits the plainspoken self-reflexivity of early Morgan Fisher, combining it with the conceptual playfulness found in so much of Karissa Hahn's work. It is governed by the basic limitations of the hand-wound Bolex, which means that even as Pirker observes a single action in real time, our access to that time is interrupted. So we much mentally complete the film to compensate for the black-leader gaps that signify Pirker's mechanical reset, even as the action observes continues apace. What we are watching is artist Gerlind Zeilner drawing a picture of herself being filmed by Pirker, a simple enough gesture that places the film in a long art-historical lineage. One thinks of Las Meninas or The Arnolfini Wedding even though, at base, Real Time is structured by a modest, self-contained event.

Hotel Royal (Salomé Lamas, 2021)

Situated somewhere between structural cinema and abstract narrative, Lamas's newest film owes a certain debt to Chantal Akerman (especially Hotel Monterrey) while more than staking out its own aesthetic language. Hotel Royal is constructed around a semi-fictional conceit, that of a part-time chambermaid (Ana Moreira) who occupies the titular hotel like a ghost, roaming the halls and entering the private sanctums of various guests. Each room is introduced in the same way, visually described by the same set of shots. As a metronome clicks off the seconds of her day, the chambermaid narrates the various contents of each room, a set of stories implied by objects temporarily abandoned by their owners.

An attentive viewer will immediately notice Lamas's implicit homage to The Shining, but here the haunting is conducted on the material realm. Itinerant labor is the unseen force that drives both the film and the functioning of the hotel itself, and Moreira emphasizes her detachment from everything she sees. She is not interested in fantasy, envisioning herself entering the secret lives of others. That's because her time, and to some extent her consciousness, are already bought and paid for. She affords us no fictional gratification, no sense that she is borrowing the aspirational costumes of the rich. Instead, Hotel Royal is a rigorous portrait of a person being slowly emptied of her basic identity.

Merapi (Malena Szlam, 2021)

Mount Merapi is an active volcano, one of several on the island of Java. In this silent film, Szlam performs a fragmented survey of the landscape around Merapi, closely observing such ordinary phenomena as cloud movement, sunrise and sunset, and the subtle interplay between light and shadow, the horizon and the mountains that tower over it. Although Szlam's camera is mostly stationary (there is one noteworthy R-to-L pan early on), this is a film in the tradition of Brakhage, composed of brief shots and edited according to rhythmic gestures. Close-ups and long shots suddenly follow one another, and the sky, conveyed with radiant reds and ambers, suddenly gives way to the dense blue of dusk.

There are a lot of reasons why so many good films have not gotten programmed this year, but it mostly seems to be the result of a bottleneck in the production / exhibition ratio. Filmmakers have been highly productive, but festival slots have been radically scaled back. But Szlam's film is perhaps instructive in regards to current trends in avant-garde programming. Merapi is a somewhat challenging film, one that takes a couple of viewings to fully appreciate. And despite the Szlam's Indonesia is quite far from Daïchi Saïto's Chilean and Argentinian locations, there are visual parallels between Merapi and earthearthearth, a more overtly dynamic film. I can't say whether other programmers found themselves watching them side by side, but it's possible that silent austerity is out of fashion once again. When the fashions shift the next time, Merapi will be waiting.