Prometheus (Dominic Angerame, 2021) (Patreon)

In other writing, I've lamented the fact that so many showcases for experimental film have so fixated on discovering new talent that many old masters of the field have been left by the wayside. Recently I've reflected on this frustration, and I have realized a few things. First, the response comes from a place of personal anxiety. I worry that my own aesthetic sensibility is so calcified that I simply cannot wrap my brain around the newest work. It relies on cultural touchpoints and generational experiences that I don't share, leaving me at sea as a viewer. But it may also involve over-identification with the old guard. As a writer and an academic, I watch younger colleagues rising, while I mostly stay in the same place. 

I recently revisited a lot of films by the late Jim Jennings, and while I was awestruck all over again by most of the work, I was also able to see it from a certain distance. Jennings' films are miles away from the kinds of experimental films being made today. They rely on aesthetic assumptions that, I think, many younger makers simply don't share. Jennings believed that the everyday world as we find it could be dazzling and inspirational if we only learn to look at it. He saw all of us as fundamentally equal in our ability to respond to light, to allow it to palpate our retinas and feel the gentle nudge of cinematic form.

When I write about work like this, I recognize that even among those with an abiding interest in experimental media, I am focusing on works that are out of step with our contemporary cultural impulses. I am speaking to a margin of a margin, a sliver of the populace who are as stuck in the past as I am. My tendency is to just keep working, without too much concern for who my audience might be. But when I do recognize just how anachronistic the very idea of "avant-garde film" has become, it gives me pause. I try to convince myself that there is a chance that some of this work will find a new audience in the future, and that I am trying to contribute to that future in some small way.

It may not be possible to prevent our worldviews from getting old. (Attempts at staying hip usually seem desperate and misguided -- "cringe," as they say.) We are all working towards our own obsolescence, a timing-out of relevance, such that we can pass quietly out of the universe knowing that it has capable new stewards, with skills and perception and imagination well beyond anything we could ever have accomplished. I think maybe the only way we can actively contribute to that process is to cede the floor to new voices, and avoid reactionary, "fuck them kids" attitudes when we simply don't get it anymore.

Dominic Angerame is a San Francisco filmmaker whose works have always impressed me, even if I did not always respond favorably to them. In his city-symphony films of the nineties and early aughts, he combined a high-contrast, Kodalith style of cinematography with musical scores that we might call "romantic drone" or "Mahleresque minimalism." As with several of the soundtracks of Phil Solomon's films, I sometimes found these aural gestures a bit too over-the-top and grandiloquent, working against the general modesty of the visuals.

I feel a bit differently now. It takes some balls to call a film Prometheus. (I suspect Angerame has never seen "The Critic.") These semi-triumphalist musical gestures now strike me as somewhat ironic, but mostly a sincere assertion of artistic worth -- an insistence that finding new ways to simply see the world around us is, if not heroic, at least an important vocation.

Prometheus is a profoundly simple film. It reminds me a bit of Jennings' work in that it employs urbanized abstraction to reveal ordinary rhythms, of labor, of weather and atmosphere, and light and dark. It's a film that could have been made decades ago, except that its brevity and modesty of means suggests a kind of valedictory attitude, as if Angerame has whittled his process down to only the essentials. It troubles me a bit that Dominic made a new film and, by and large, not much attention was paid to it. He's worked too hard for too long to find himself shouting into a void. But that could be said for many people.

Watch it and see what you think.