A Little More NYFF Currents (Patreon)

Grandma's Scissors (Erica Sheu, 2021)

Sheu's previous film Transcript was a delightful discovery, one that approached things with a formalist stance but was so delicately handmade that its maker's personality was palpably felt throughout. Grandma's Scissors is arguably more personal, but in a rather direct, unmysterious way. Sheu tells us about her grandmother who was a master tailor in Taiwan, making dresses for that country's wealthy and political elite. We see images of Sheu's grandmother in the present day, but more significantly we see her words in subtitles and in the script of her Taiwanese dialect. Sheu also makes abundantly clear that she sees her work with celluloid -- editing, assembling -- as having a materialist relationship to her grandmother's artistry. Like a lot of films this year, it is quite passive-aggressive, displaying a modesty of means but making sure to tell the viewer exactly what it's about.

Estuary (Ross Meckfessel, 2021)

I am consistently intrigued by Meckfessel's films, but I don't really get them. I keep expecting the Aha! moment that I often have with such filmmakers, where everything just comes together in my mind and I wonder how I could have been so obtuse. Alas, Estuary doesn't look like the Rosetta Stone I've been waiting for, but it certainly continues Meckfessel's hot streak in terms of making films that look and sound like nobody else's. 

Meckfessel seems preoccupied with digital imaging technologies, social media, and other new forms that are forcefully changing the way our bodies engage with the world. Here, we see repeated shots of a young woman on Instagram or TikTok, whose presence as a swipable entity seems to have subtly boomeranged back on her, as her face and body are reconfigured as sleek avatars, an icon without a referent. This motif is combined with other shots that appear to represent things in the world -- streetlights, people -- but are stranded behind digital scrims of interference. Meckfessel clearly wants to suggest that, now more than ever, the medium is the message, and the message is death.

Note: I may revise or add to this review on subsequent viewings, because I am still not sure about it (the review or the film). 

Tonalli (Colectivo los Ingrávidos, 2021)

Easily the best film I've seen in Currents so far, the latest from Ingrávidos certainly stands on its own merits. I'll get to that in a second. But it goes a long way toward correcting a problem that I've had with this group for awhile. If you subscribe to their Vimeo channel, you know that the collective churns out work at a rather startling rate. I cannot be sure, but I suspect that this art-in-volume approach is an outgrown of the group's radical politics. Not only does their operation as a collective mean they can generate more work under the "corporate" banner of Ingrávados, whereas an individual maker would be far more limited. They also seem to be actively working against the conventional perception of the artwork as a precious, singular object. It's about getting ideas out into the world, rather than fussing over their ideal instantiation.

While I understand this impulse, it can make it difficult to keep up with Ingrávidos, and as with other fast workers (Hong Sangsoo, Takashi Miike), the output is highly variable. That's what makes Tonalli such a pleasant surprise. It's the group's most fully-formed aesthetic statement since their Sun Quartet from a few years back. The film is based on highly rhythmic superimpositions, with collections of objects pulsing into and out of the frame in a kind of visual syncopation. The percussive soundtrack certainly helps, as it keeps shifting in relation to the visual patterns.

The group's usual pre-Columbian motifs are forcefully present in Tonalli, the title of which refers to an Aztec concept of a soul, one of three, that resides in the front of the skull. This is in part suggested by the appearance of Aztec masks, which alternate with brightly colored flowers -- the sense that the head and face are bursting with animate spiritual energy. As the film progresses, we start to see shots of a full moon in various positions, bouncing around the frame. Once Tonalli really gets going, we see the various forms begin to intersect, with circles, scuffling and colliding with more organic forms. 

This visual action may seem aleatory, but highly formal relationships result from the superimposition and animation. Tonalli often looks like a specifically Latin American riff on the abstract films of Oskar Fischinger. But his strict, Teutonic operations are replaced with gestures that reference a different cultural history, one that does not necessarily insist on aesthetic exploration as a rarefied realm. By observing the natural world, as well as classical Mexican history, Ingrávidos discover rhythmic energy within concrete, motivated signifiers.

To Pick a Flower (Shireen Seno, 2021)

This has been the hardest film to evaluate so far, in part because -- and I know this is a statement that will invite argument -- I don't think it really qualifies as a "film," at least not by any meaningful definition. Seno is showing a sequence of photographs taken by colonialists in the early part of the 20th century as they came into the Philippines to set up a logging industry in Asia. The images are valuable and often interesting documents of exploitation, as they show racialized power relations between Western capital and Filipino labor.

The thing is, Seno simply shows these images and, in her voiceover, tells us exactly what they represent. She does make one notable comment about the way many of the photographs emphasize the white men's physical presence, playing with scale to make them look equal to or larger than the trees. But this is the only instance in which Seno invites us to look closer at the evidence. 

For the most part, she places the images in an objective historical context, almost rendering them irrelevant as images. The result isn't essayistic, because there is no real subjective attitude toward the photos, nor are they connected to similar types of images from other locations or periods. To Pick a Flower is an illustrated academic paper, or perhaps a TED Talk. Or more generously, this might be a preliminary sketch for a fiction feature based on the situations she articulates. But as is, it is a highly disappointing selection.