Covering More (Prismatic) Ground (Patreon)

(Just a random-ass jawn for my Philly peeps.)

open sky / open sea / open ground (Martín Baus and Libertad Gills, 2022)

It's perhaps appropriate that the only image I can find from this delicate Super-8 film is so tiny. It gives a sense of how defiantly small the work is. The two filmmakers are from Ecuador, and I had never heard of them or their work before, but I will certainly be on the lookout for them in the future. Open Sky possesses rich monochromes that may be the result or tinting, or just light control and hand-processing. The imagery, shot on the seashore, suggests human labor and its engagement with the natural world, but abjures clarity in favor of movement and tone. Shorebirds are reduced to hashmarks on an intimate canvas; discernible figures are flattened out against an encompassing sky. 

Golden Jubilee (Suneil Sanzgiri, 2021)

Sanzgiri's 2020 film Letter From Your Far-Off Country was very widely shown, and understandably so. His work does a very good job at articulating the personal and the political, frequently with a focus on his own family and their immediate, ground-level responses to turmoil in the Indian state of Goa. Golden Jubilee is a work with a much more specific target: the legacy of British colonialism. Sanzgiri combines original footage and audio recordings of the filmmaker's father, who is confronting a virtual mock-up of his family home. His distance from Goa is contrasted with the disturbing comfort with which British colonists move through Goa and make it theirs, for industrial profit but also as a thoughtless performance of white supremacy. Passages from a British travelogue film display a haughty paternalism that strives to remake the world in its own image, over and over again.

Heron 1954-2002 (Alexis McCrimmon, 2021-22)

Definitely the best film I saw in Prismatic Ground, Heron 1954-2002 is an abstract memorial to someone close to the artist who died of an opioid overdose. Throughout the film, McCrimmon combines street scenes and landscapes with deeply private interiors, creating rich, powerful images from seemingly ordinary fragments of a life such as a burning cigarette in a crystal ashtray or a bulbous candle on an end table. McCrimmon's particular mode of still-life photography actually reminded me of Sarah Cwynar's work, since both she and McCrimmon isolate various material things, creating hieratic frame-spaces in which they assert their totemic power. But where Cwynar is focused on the commodity fetish, McCrimmon instead considers those otherwise random objects that become charmed or radiant because they are what remains when someone dies. Alongside this approach, McCrimmon uses color printing distortion to warm and distend actual photos of Heron, suggesting the elasticity and the inevitable dissipation of memory. Heron is a rare find, a film that announces the arrival of an important artist.