Some Brief Notes on..... (Patreon)

Although I was not able to completely devote my weekend to the Prismatic Ground online film festival -- a challenging and always intriguing selection of experimental documentaries -- I did get to sample a fair amount. (With the help of James Hansen, I have secured links for some of the films I missed, so I will probably weigh in on those later.) I ended up having mixed feelings about the selections overall, although not so much because of the inevitably variable quality -- programmer Inney Prakash does a fine job, has productively catholic tastes, and is an all-around mensch. 

No, it had more to do with a sense that we are experiencing a sea change, wherein experimental film and video is being vouchsafed into the broader consciousness (so to speak) due to its willingness to bring documentary content into its purview. That is, formal experimentation, more and more, seems to require a "purpose" (social, historical, political) in order to justify its place in the current content-scape. (I highly recommend Genevieve Yue's essay about this trend and its relationship to institutional politics.)

In general, I try to refrain from casting aspersions on small, personal endeavors, unless I think there are some egregious politics that need to be addressed. And, in a strange bit of benevolent defensiveness, the Prismatic Ground website asked us to "respect the work." (I'm not sure what that means, exactly. Don't criticize it out loud? Don't download it without permission? Don't watch it in a piecemeal way?) So I feel a bit odd about having expressed my concerns on Twitter, especially since my account, which exploits a back-door loophole to circumvent my perma-ban, cannot ever feature my real name. (I hate anonymity; it breeds cowards.) But I hope the remarks were taken in the spirit intended. In a way, they were much more about me, and my ongoing concern about (ir)relevance.

Anyway, here are some selections I liked. (Since Patreon has been wonky with its edit / save functions, I will post three write-ups here, and another three in a separate post.)

A Vessel, the Ideas Pass Through (Linnea Nugent, 2022)

Available here. James informed me that Nugent is/was a student of both Luther Price and Saul Levine, and although this film is quite distinct from anything those two have done, it shares their commitment to small statements and an overall painterly approach. Nugent brings her camera up-close to various bodies and objects, and moves it with agitated handheld gestures. A Vessel, as the title suggests, treats the frame as a space for light and movement to pass through on their way to object-formation, but Nugent stops short of allowing anything to really "form."

She Gather Me (Miatta Kawinzi, 2021)

She Gather Me is a work that appeared to me to have been a single-channel edit of a video installation work. The fact that this is not the case makes the piece that much more interesting, since it suggests that Kawinzi is fundamentally committed to the insufficiency of any given single image. Based on concepts and fragments drawn from Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and others, She Gather Me places varying forms of motion against each other in layers and frames-within-frames, so we get (for example) an undulating seascape -- the uneasy perspective of someone on a boat, perhaps but not necessarily an allusion to the Middle Passage -- with the rushing insistence of train tracks out a window. 

Against this, Kawinzi uses audio of someone singing "Dat Old Black Gal," a work song among the Black workmen who built the railroads. Using a hiccupping loop, Kawinzi refuses to simply let the song "be" in some indicative, ethnographic way. Instead, we are asks to focus on its sonic materiality, and the historical situation from which it arose. With fragmented text, and the fugue-like appearance of other images (a camisole hanging in the wind; hands reaching toward each other), She Gather Me insists upon the shattered character of African-American historical knowledges, and the care required when attempting to reassemble them.

Vecino Vecino (Camila Galaz, 2022)

Vecino is Spanish for "neighbor," and Galaz's complex video collage is a consideration of Pinochet's Chile, where solidarity could in no way be assumed among those who ostensibly share material interests. The basis for Vecino Vecino is a 1986 French documentary about the MAPU Lautaro, a group of leftist guerrillas fighting against the dictatorship. For much of her video, Galaz either mimics "revolutionary" poses or gestures seen in the documentary, or places a black border around the original images, filling the margins with seemingly real-time English translations and other notes and comments. 

This material is combined with bits of personal correspondence and reported speech from Galaz's family members, who insisted that she stay away from the country while the violence was happening. So we get the sense that the documentary reflects not only a European perspective on Latin American radicalism, but Galaz's own window / filter on her homeland -- a Godardian, "here and elsewhere" conundrum that Galaz wisely doesn't try to resolve.