Rotterdam 2020: a sampling (pt. 3) (Patreon)

(Just in case this eons-in-the-making comedy callback was leaving you confused.)

Splendid Isolation (Urszula Antoniak, 2022)

I've been seeing Antoniak's name pop up a lot in recent years, so I figured it was time to give one of her films a spin. I was not at all sorry I did, even if Splendid Isolation ultimately feels like a slender premise attenuated with a lot of minimalist stylistics. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the film plays like a really solid cover version of a classic tune, the "tune" in this case being Atmospheric Arthouse Cinema. Two women, Anna (Khadjia El Kharraz Alami) and Hannah (Anneke Sluiters) wash up on a rocky shore. Their behavior is stilted and strange, and apparently we are to intuit that they are lovers, although that only becomes apparent very late in the film. They discover an abandoned house, conspicuous in its posh modernism. And they essentially hide out, and Hannah becomes sicker and more frail.

Antoniak provides acres of empty space for us to compose a narrative out of Splendid Isolation, to the extent that the title could describe the viewer's own experience. Did they survive a shipwreck? Are they fleeing a worldwide contagion? Are there underlying fissures in Anna and Hannah's relationship that are temporarily sealed over by the rituals of caregiving? One could answer yes to any of these questions, or ask an entirely different set, and Isolation would remain just as ambiguous. The only real "crisis" occurs when the two women discover they are not alone. A third woman (Abke Haring, noticeably futch compared with the two femme leads) enters the scene, as a rival for Hannah's affections. This seduction, however, in no way precludes the possibility that the new woman is actually a harbinger of death.

Your mileage will vary, depending on your patience. For me, Splendid Isolation worked as an extremely pared down riff on the "elevated horror" that's all the rage right now. Oz Perkins'  I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House came to mind while watching this, but Antoniak is even less straightforward than Perkins, going all-in on a free-flowing, amoebic allusiveness. 

Answering the Sun (Rainer Kohlberger, 2022)

I have not seen as many of Kohlberger's films as many of my friends have, which is interesting in itself. Kohlberger appears to have amassed quite a following among film buffs who do not normally gravitate toward experimental cinema, and I think I understand why. There's no sense that you're "missing something" when watching one of his films, that Kohlberger is plumbing the depths of a specific cinematic discourse that you may or may not be familiar with. One can respond to these works on a purely visceral level, since their reduced means -- color, shape, and movement -- produce palpable effects on/in the eye.

That's not to say Kohlberger is working in a void. The two most obvious precedents for his mode of abstraction are the axiomatic color-field flickers of Paul Sharits and the circular mandala films of Jordan Belson. Two more different sensibilities could hardly be imagined, but Kohlberger combines the cone-bending color manipulations of Sharits with the pulsating, anti-rational spirituality of Belson. The results are both hypnagogic and aggressive.

Unlike those filmmakers, however, Kohlberger works digitally. This produces a very different impact, one I am somewhat ambivalent about. Sharits worked on the level of the 16mm frame, so that a red frame and a green frame would collide in the eye as a sudden jolt, one the sluggish human eye could only perceive after the fact. Kohlberger, working at the level of the pixel, is able to replace clashes with smooth blends and transitions. They bombard the eye, but they also cover their tracks and permit our vision to absorb the movement between distinct hues. Put another way, if Sharits' frames are like keys on a piano, Kohlberger's digital aesthetic plays like a perpetual glissando.

Answering the Sun is Kohlberger's longest film to date. Its soundtrack consists of electronic hums and pulses, constantly mutating but always in a logical direction. There are dozens of experimental films that employ these "glitch" tracks as an unobtrusive baseline for the "real action," the image track. But Answering the Sun is one of the first films I've seen where this otherwise negligible surface noise seems to be driving the visuals. Watching Kohlberger's featurette, I felt a bit like I was observing computer code in action. At any given point, there are a handful of possible directions the film can go, generating a multi-directional if / then statement. This is especially true in the second half, when color takes a backseat to shape and line, a kind of Op Art hypno-wheel. Given its length, I suppose I'd have liked Answering the Sun to hang together a bit better. But as the title suggests, Kohlberger wants us to look at his film as we would the sun itself, not looking for particular effects but simply pushing our retinas to the outer limits. 

When We Were Monsters (Steve Reinke and James Richards, 2020)

Steve Reinke is such a prolific artist, and it's taken me awhile to get a handle on his project. Here, collaborating with British artist James Richards, Reinke has produced one of his very finest works, one that goes straight to the heart of contemporary body-politics without ever announcing its intentions overtly. When We Were Monsters is a post-humanist riff on Theodor Adorno's question regarding "poetry after Auschwitz." Is there identity after the collapse of the body? After the Internet? What will those identities look like? And will we even recognize them?

When We Were Monsters begins with a flicker film made by sculptor Gretchen Bender. It quickly rifles through hundreds of photographs of human deformity and dysfunction: syphilis, leprosy, cleft palate, small pox, all manner of human misery. When seen in rapid succession, these images radically disrupt our own sense of physical being, reminding us that a plethora of ailments can alter our basic form and that the category of "human" is widely, distressingly variable. (It should be noted, these are not images of disability, but of agonizing medical pathology that in most cases would not be survivable. These are pictures of the body in pain.)

Using poetic fragments, cellular animations, and other assorted forms of abstraction and disintegration, Richards and Reinke remind us that the body as we perceive is is not its scientific truth. We are strings of cells, temporary arrangements that exceed our puny desires. I'd really like to see this film again, since it is a remarkably dense, essayistic work that demands repeat viewing. But for now, I can say that When We Were Monsters implies a brand of Deluezian queer theory adequate to expressing our post-self era.