NYFF Currents-a-Go-Go (Patreon)

In and Out a Window (Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie, 2021)

Although the Currents website lists this as a solo work by Tuohy, the end credits make it clear that this is another co-authored work by Tuohy and Barrie, his frequent filmmaking partner. They are founding members of Nanolab, Australia's premiere independent laboratory for experimental film production, roughly equivalent to Double Negative in Canada (of which Daïchi Saïto is a charter member). I have generally admired Tuohy and Barrie's work, but In and Out a Window strikes me as somewhat problematic for a few reasons.

First of all, this film is so ensconced in the avant-garde vernacular that it's difficult to see what it actually contributes. Using manual shutter exposures that produce an effect of animating still images, In and Out a Window focuses on exactly one window space. Usually the filmmakers show us the yard outside, with trees, steps, and a birdbath. Occasionally the area outside the window goes dark, revealing the surrounding interior of the home. With each new image accompanied by a series of metronome clicks, the film unavoidably suugests that these images of a single space are marking time, displaying slow, enframed change.

But Tuohy and Barrie's composition of the film relies on what we might call "soft structuralism," focusing and refocusing the image, tilting it, rotating it, slowly zooming into it, all manner of permutations that do not really ask us to reconsider the image's contents. In and Out a Window just goes through its paces with no real development or expansion. If you are unfamiliar with the filmmakers who have already worked this side of the street (Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr, Eriko Sonoda, and especially Rose Lowder), this might seem impressive. But to me it plays like formalism for people who don't like formalism. It's adorns a simple but unobtrusive subject with technical maneuvers it's impossible to miss.

2 Pasolini (Andrei Ujica, 2020)

Commissioned by the Cartier Foundation (just like Peleshian's Nature), 2 Pasolini is undeniably lovely, seeing as it is mostly composed for footage shot by Pasolini. It's a short document regarding PPP's scouting of locations in Palestine in preparation for The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. In about eight minutes, Ujica combines nonfiction material, such as repeated shots of Palestinian farmers pitching hay, with shots taken directly from Saint Matthew, making this a valuable DVD extra but not all that much more. In fact, Ujica's only obvious twist on the Pasolini footage comes at the end, when the filmmakers plays Christ off with a generic "don't fuck with me" rap song. Ha ha, Jesus was a pimp.

All Your Stars Are but Dust On My Shoes (Haig Aivazian, 2021)

In recent years Currents has shown a definite predilection toward fragmented essay films, works in the post-Farocki vein by folks like Steve Reinke, Basim Magdy, and Riccardo Giacconi. As with most subgenres, the work is highly variable, and for some filmmakers this assemblage mode has become a means to avoid certain formal decisions, such as organization or specificity of subject. After all, if everything is connected to everything else, what doesn't belong in your film? This latest work from Lebanese filmmaker Haig Aivazian is a great example of how to approach this method. 

All Your Stars is essentially about electricity as a literalization of state power, and the film examines the role of public utilities as purveyors of light and darkness, working to make sure that the disadvantaged in Lebanon and Syria remain unilluminated and unseen. By considering the unequal distribution of electrical power, Aivazian concludes that nothing less than human perception is at stake, determining who can and cannot see, and who remains systematically off the grid of civilization. Much like those Canadian work safety PSAs from a few years back, All Your Stars concludes that there are really no accidents, that resources are always allocated or withheld by Assad and others for strategic reasons. And yet, as Aivazian shows, certain counter-tactics are available to those stranded in the dark.

Homage to the Work of Philip Henry Gosse (Pablo Weber, 2020)

And here we have another well-considered, intelligently structured example of the essay-film. Weber suggests an idea that I am not adequately STEM-oriented to either accept or reject, but it is compelling as far as it goes. The the current technologized landscape is driven by data and code, and such code -- operating systems, algorithms, etc. -- functions not as a linear set of computations (e.g., an old if/then logic problem) but as a nonlinear web of nodes and connections. As such, data do not exist in linear time, and can branch in all directions, including retroactive recoding. Although he does not explain it as such, Weber seems to suggest that computing networks and AIs partake of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit, or "deferred action." In short, a change occurs in a system (the psyche, the network) that reformulates the past around it, generating an "always-already-has-been," a retroactive temporality.

Weber structures this argument around the work of prolific, eventually disgraced 19th century naturalist Philip Henry Gosse. A contemporary of Darwin, Gosse was obsessed with cataloguing coral, believing that its rhizomatic organization exemplified the unblemished thinking of God. Gosse was a devout Christian, a lay theologian as well as a scientist. When science discovered ancient fossils, proving that the earth was much older than the 6,000 years professed by Genesis, Gosse introduced a theory that was basically Christian Nachträglichkeit. The earth really was only 6,000 years old. But when He created the world, God instantaneously generated a retroactive antiquity, installing fossilized evidence of a "past" that extended infinitely back in time. In short, God produced a double-headed timeline for our world, so paleontology could be squared with the account in Genesis.

As Weber explains, Gosse was laughed into oblivion by both the scientific and theological communities, and died in obscurity. However, the crystalline structure of computer networks and AI are a belated (or retroactive) vindication of Gosse's expanded-temporality thesis. Have we achieved a "future" that will exist as a perpetual present? Are computer simulations an instantiation of the mind of God? Weber is content to simply suggest this homology, neither subscribing to the idea or mocking it. And Homage shows that the best essay-films are those that tentatively pose questions instead of answering them.