Recent Experimental Cinema 1: Mack, Fleischmann (Patreon)

As I mentioned in my TIFF Wavelengths wrap-up, the pandemic has been an oddly productive time for the experimental film community. When one considers that certain festival showcases did not really happen in 2020, and dozens of filmmakers were under quarantine in their homes, which for most of them doubles as a studio, it's not entirely surprising that in 2021 we're experiencing a bottleneck of avant-garde cinema, more work than can reasonably be programmed.

Still, some new work by major film artists has thus far gone unscreened in North America. There are various reasons for this. As it stands, many experimental film showcases to which we've long been accustomed are going through significant changes. In some cases, such as Wavelengths, the main festival has scaled back its commitment to experimental film (hopefully only temporarily). In other cases, such as NYFF Currents, the program itself appears to be undergoing a redefinition, trying new approaches and searching for a stable new identity. And of course, sometimes it's just a matter of bad timing.

At the end of this month, MoMA will be featuring a series of programs curated by Mark McElhatten, NYFF's former programmer for avant-garde film. Several of the works to be screened in McElhatten's Carte Blanche will be world premieres, and a few of them are discussed below. Programs like this, or the recent Prismatic Ground festival, are exactly the right responses to this shifting state of affairs. When there are so many worthy films, it's incumbent upon enterprising programmers to create new venues for them.

Wasteland No. 3: Moons, Sons (Jodie Mack, 2021)

Jodie Mack is perhaps best known for her two featurettes, Dusty Stacks of Mom (2013) and The Grand Bizarre (2018). One of the most striking characteristics of those films is Mack's use of music, which she selects or composes in order to strengthen and dramatize the rhythmic relationships within her montage itself. Her soundtracks do not accompany the images so much as kick them into high gear, like a shot of nitrous into an already moving engine. At the same time, Mack has made a number of short films, the Wasteland series, that instead participate in experimental cinema's distinguished history of absolute silence. Unsurprisingly, these films are highly concentrated in terms of their visual content, fixing our attention on remnants of broken technology (No. 1: Ardent, Verdant) or natural forms severed from their proper environment (No. 2: Hardy, Hearty).

Mack's newest Wasteland film, Moons, Sons, is sort of a direct sequel to Hardy, Hearty. Like the earlier film, No. 3 depicts bits of collected flora and vegetation that have been frozen in water, much of the film consisting of Mack's camera watching the ice melt around the now-dead flora. But whereas No. 2's white background and subtle distance from the objects lent it a quasi-scientific mien, No. 3 is a kind of unexpected requiem for life itself. Mack has stuffed all manner of flowers and plants together into cups and frozen them into circular clumps. The result is somewhere between a flower arrangement and a car crash, a tangle of different colors and forms artificially packed together in a brutal crush. We slowly observe the moisture dribble away from these leaves, and while No. 2's melting suggested a minor liberation, No. 3's gradual thaw conveys nothing so much as the oozing away of life. 

It is certainly tempting to read Moons, Sons in relation to the hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths, and that is probably not entirely wrong. But Mack's film is more generally about loss, the fact that the warmth of our existence inevitably brings with it our bodily dissolution.

Untitled (34bsp) (Philipp Fleischmann, 2021)

There are a handful of filmmakers whose excellence is so thoroughly consistent that they run the risk of being taken for granted. Philipp Fleischmann is one of the most conceptually and aesthetically significant experimental filmmakers in Europe, but his work doesn't appeal to everybody. At a moment of extreme political polarization, there has been a general drift towards films and filmmakers whose social commentary is absolutely explicit, at times rendering the films themselves almost superfluous. Fleischmann's work is also highly political, but not in the obvious ways that many viewers seem to demand at the moment.

In terms of his overall project, Fleischmann is best compared not with another filmmaker but with a conceptual sculptor, Michael Asher. Asher was a philosophical artist who was concerned not with the internal relationships of art itself, or even art's inevitable confluence with institutional power. Instead, Asher wanted to expose the bare bones of the institutions themselves, resulting in architectural interventions such as sandblasting a gallery wall down to the studs, or making adjustments in the museum space that might not be apparent to those unfamiliar with the exhibition area.

Fleischmann is a conceptual heir to Asher. In his work, he uses hand-built cameras to generate direct, mostly lens-free inscriptions of the exhibition spaces on the celluloid. Rather that simply photographing a museum structure, he abandons the 24fps system of representation, creating conditions in which the architecture's own organization becomes the organization of the film. The results often resemble classic structuralism or flicker-films, but Fleischmann's use of organized light reveals the visual systems implicit in the buildings themselves, the way they focus the occupant's attention on certain details while obscuring others.

Untitled (34bsp) was commissioned by the São Paolo Biennial's 34th edition, hence the title. The film is bracketed by lime green and peach colored frames, produced by direct exposure to available light. In between, Fleischmann shows us the red-tinted sunlight piercing the building, as well as the more controlled slats of gallery light. The building under investigation is the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, designed by Brazil's greatest architect, Oscar Niemeyer. Untitled (34bsp) does not bring outside images into the Biennial. Rather, the film documents the physical conditions under which the Biennial can occur at all, the spatial arrangement that inflects every work of art ever shown in the Pavilion. As such, Fleischmann's film (literally) exposes the political enfranchisement of national culture, an arena defined by having both an inside and an outside.