Putting It Together: Two Avant-Garde Films (Patreon)

The Red Thread (Larry Gottheim, 1987)

Thanks to Max Proctor's wonderful Ultra Dogme site, I had the chance to catch up with some films I had not seen by Larry Gottheim, one of the most under-acknowledged masters of the 1970s "structural" avant-garde. He remains best known for his film Fog Line, a single-shot wonder that begins in obscurity and gradually reveals its contents -- to my way of thinking, an even stronger allegory for narrative cinema than Wavelength, which is more commonly talked about that way. The Red Thread is a very different kind of film, much more directly engaged in exploring the ways that the cinematic apparatus can organize our perception of the visible world.

The first thing one notices about The Red Thread is that it hinges on two very specific aspects of filmmaking: montage and camera movement. There is a closed set of motifs Gottheim explores over the course of the film. They include children playing, landscape fragments, and close-ups of weaving and needlepoint, two kinds of production that involve thread being worked into an overall pattern to generate meaning. Although we do see "red thread," we see other colors too. Where a film like Fog Line comments on the cinematic process through the use of duration, The Red Thread combines short, quick montage fragments with a handheld camera that makes small, lateral shifts, not unlike a loom. Gottheim uses editing and movement, along with a generally mid-range focus, to break up legible scenes into a temporal mosaic. The things Gottheim shows us have their own interest value -- the busyness of hands, the restlessness of the kids. But the crux of The Red Thread is Gottheim's insistence on the thingness of the film, the aggressive rhythm of its own making.

Instructions on How to Make a Film (Nazlī Dinçel, 2018)

Dinçel is one of the most consistently engaging young filmmakers working today. They are currently taking a bit of a break from producing new work, but I only just caught up with their last completed film. Vadim Rizov recommended it to me a while back, and now it makes perfect sense. Dinçel takes the title-theme of the film from a Wikihow entry on, yes, how to make a film. The directions are blithely chipper, suggesting that celluloid is cheap and easy to work with, and provides your (presumably narrative) experiment with a satisfying texture. 

Dinçel combines these verbal instructions with film material that moves in parallel with them, suggesting a kind of polyvalent metaphor. We see hands placing seeds in the ground, working to made a living addition to a field already resplendent with plants and grass. Onscreen text, stippled onto the celluloid in a manner familiar from Dinçel's earlier films, sometimes echoes the spoken words, and later, more and more, diverges from them in poetically provocative ways. 

Near the conclusion, we see a penis, which an unseen person's mouth begins mechanically fellating. The filmmaking process, Dinçel seems to suggest, can be generative, nurturing growth than will spark new seeds in turn. Or it can be purely pleasurable, the seed failing to take root. It's a sly summation of the practice of experimental filmmaking, wherein every gesture is considered in relation to the medium's history, even as the maker's own private vision is considered paramount, the guarantee of authenticity.