NYFF Currents Part Deux (Patreon)

As I mentioned to a couple of friends, there is a weird trend with this year's Currents shorts. The majority of them -- 15 in total -- are 20 minutes or longer. Another eight are between 15 and 19 minutes long. What does this tell us? Is digital technology driving independent filmmakers to make longer films? Do the programmers have some kind of affection for this particular length? Is there some misguided idea that longer films, even when they are short, are somehow more "complete" and therefore more legitimate? I honestly have no idea.

ELLE (Luise Donschen, 2021)

Donschen was included in Currents in 2019 with her short film Entire Days Together, but I have not yet caught up with it. I did see her 2018 feature Casanova Gene, which was more of a curiosity than anything, a kind of Oliveiraesque pseudo-essay about male sex addition as a philosophical and biological problem. As its unexpected centerpiece, Casanova Gene features an extended cameo by John Malkovich, portraying himself as an actor who is playing Casanova in a stage production. That alone gives you some idea.

ELLE, by contrast, is simply bizarre, a film that feels less like a completed work and more like a set of ingredients sitting on a table, barely opened. It's shot at the Kyoto Botanical Gardens, and there is a fair amount of attention paid to the flora. The final shot, for example, is a nearly two minute static shot of a wall of (I think) cerastium. But Donschen is more intrigued, it seems, by the mysterious inner lives of the garden's visitors. At the start, we see the shadows of a German man and (I think) his daughter, listing off random words and phrases. Then, he sits next to a Japanese woman on a bench. She tells him about Elle, her beloved dog who has passed away. We understand because of the subtitles; the man pointedly does not.

Imagine a late Hal Hartley short that took itself inexplicably seriously, and you're kind of on the right track. 

Kindertotenlieder (Virgil Vernier, 2021)

The title means "children’s death song," and Vernier's nearly half-hour film is indeed about two French teenagers who died in 2005 after being chased into an electrical substation by Paris police. They were electrocuted, and in the aftermath riots broke out throughout the Paris banlieues. The official story supported the cops, who claimed the kids jumped the fence "for kicks," while everyone in the Clichy-sur-Bois suburb knew full well they were running for their lives.

Vernier's film consists of news clips from the TF1 network relating to the kids' death and subsequent rioting. He assembles the clips chronologically, and his only obvious intervention is the removal of explanatory voiceover, letting the interviews and scenes of violence speak for themselves. This is quite a risk, since this approach assumes that network news will capture something resembling "the truth," if only we silence the pundits. But how many scenes never had a camera trained on them in the first place?

What one does see quite clearly is TF1's obsession with footage of burnt and/or burning cars, pretty much establishing the image of black, hollowed-out Citröens as the official emblem of the unrest. This is not surprising, since corporate news always aims to shift the focus from loss of life to loss of property, on the assumption that the middle classes will side with police power. Still, I am not sure what Kindertotenlieder contributes to the discourses of urban oppression, and as an art-monument, it pales beside Jean-Marie Straub's 2006 film Europa 2005 -- 27 October, a set of still shots of the boys' place of death.

Personality Test (Justin Jinsoo Kim, 2021)

I can see from a web search that Kim has been making films for awhile, but Personality Test feels very much like a student film. I don't mean this pejoratively, exactly. But in this film, Kim applies a particular formal method he seems comfortable with -- stop-motion imagery derived from color copies and collages -- to a reasonably objective, unrelated set of data. In this case, he had a friend take a personality test online, one that asked a bunch of questions about one's feelings about the forest. 

In theory, this would be a suitably "structuralist" thing to do, deriving content from an impersonal test based on organization and classification. In practice, though, it becomes a kind of crypto-portrait of Kim's friend, whose answers are not exactly original or compelling. Formally, the most impressive element in Personality Test is when Kim extracts segments from different parts of the image and swaps them in the frame. Admittedly, it was more impressive before I figured out he was animating still images and not manipulating actual motion pictures. (What Luther Price spent years of his life struggling to accomplish, Kim manages with a glue-stick.) Still, it's promising.

Cutting the Mushroom (Mike Crane, 2021)

I have no idea who Mike Crane is. And while this is really not an experimental film by any meaningful definition, it succeeds on its own term. Cutting the Mushroom is a bit like the humor of now-disgraced British comedian James Veitch, whose best-known shtick is replying to email spam and stringing the scammers along with progressively more ridiculous questions and proposals. In Crane's case, he has made contact (how? don't know) with a shady art dealer in the Eastern Bloc, specializing in Eastern European Primitivism.

Crane shows us images of the various sketchy artworks he's purchased, and has someone read aloud the emails he received from "DV," the art seller who always seems to have left the provenance paperwork in his other pants. When Crane tells DV that he had an obvious forgery appraised and authenticated as a real Picasso, the guy has to play along so as to not cast doubt on his already-evident line of bullshit. "Well, too bad for me, but very good for you!"

This is certainly entertaining enough, but in the same way a "Daily Show" sketch would be. James N. Kienitz Wilkins is much better at this type of wry essayistic comedy.

Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical (Rhea Storr, 2020)

Another work that is sharp, pleasurable, and informative, Rhea Storr's Black Radical is a deft collage of documentary imagery and critical-theory voiceover dealing with the concept of Afro-Futurism. Storr suggests that the concepts of futurity or Black extraterrestrial existence may be a bit misplaced, since the important aspects of Afro-Futurism -- most notably the syncretic production of material evidence of Black creativity, the ability to generate radical visions out of low-cost consumer and post-consumer elements -- is already evident in the Bahamian carnival known as Junkaroo. Storr has some beautiful footage, and the overall approach is a bit like experimental ethnography. It's not groundbreaking, but it is more than solid. 

More coming up soon, including new films by Ross Meckfessel and Los Ingrávados.