Three Recent Experimental Films (Patreon)

Surface Rites (Ryan Ferko, Faraz Anoushahpor, Parastoo Anoushahpor, 2022)

The Canada-based law offices of Anoushahpour, Anoushahpor, and Ferko have been making reliably deft experimental documentaries for nearly a decade. Although the subject matter of the films varies widely, there are a few commonalities. The films are usually based in the specificities of one or more global cultures, and the team is much more interested in inference than in argument. Like Deleuze's notion of the assemblage, AFA films operate on the basis of conceptual proximity, combining materials that do not immediately reveal their overarching purpose. Their skillful editing and camerawork provides formal continuity across the divergent shots, providing a basic coherence. But there are times when, following a single viewing, it is not always clear why all these parts constitute a "film."

Surface Rites is essentially about cross-cultural simulacra, the way that global capital homogenizes space only to repackage the local as a symbol of its irretrievable loss. Among the threads in the film are a Slovakian immigrant who moves to Canada and opens a uranium mine, and then uses some of the profits to create a replica of a church from his childhood village. Meanwhile, we check in with breeders of "elite" Holstein cows, who discuss the eugenics of modern animal husbandry. At one point, we see cattlemen using ink to darken the cows' black spots before a livestock show, again turning nature into a sign of itself.

After Work (Céline Condorelli and Ben Rivers, 2022)

In recent years, the great British avant-documentarian Ben Rivers has been making a considerable amount of collaborative work. Always intent on learning more about the scenes in front of his lens, Rivers turns to other artists to help him grapple with what he may not know. After joining forces with filmmakers such as Ben Russel and Anocha Suwichakornpong, he has now teamed up with visual artist / researcher Céline Condorelli. In her work, Condorelli explores relationships between public and private space, and the relationship between work and leisure.

For After Work, Rivers and Condorelli adopt a rather Farockian cinematic approach. The film is about the construction of a playground in South London, on an estate that has institutional connections with Condorelli's gallery. We go back and forth between the spatialized labor or installing the fencing and equipment, and the actual forging of the metal equipment in a factory. Following from Henri Lefebvre's insight that all social space is produced, After Work not only shows the adult labor behind children's play; the film also asks us to watch as the playground takes shape, it being the end result of a host of industrial decisions. As a counterpoint to this visual information, After Work features a voiceover by poet Jay Bernard, which lights upon these very questions in an allusive, open form. The result is one of Rivers' finest works, and indeed one of the best films of the year.

Welcome (Jean-Claude Rousseau, 2022)

Mere months after the premiere of his last short film The Tomb of Kafka, Rousseau returns with a subtle homage to the 1970s in New York City, a time defined by tenement living as well as the art-world dominance of minimalist sculpture and structural film. Welcome takes place inside a dimly lit apartment. Rousseau's fixed camera is trained on a window, through which we can observe the windows of a building across the alley. There is a desktop just under the window, which permits Rousseau to casually place objects into a still life: house keys, a teapot, a cup of tea.

Welcome quickly fades between shots that are identical, except for the fact that they are not. Lighting conditions shift. Activity can be spied in the building across the way. Rousseau's reflection appears on the surface of the window when he turns on the light in the bathroom, behind the camera. And perhaps most strikingly, a taped-up piece of cardboard is attached to the bottom of the window on the outside. As the wind comes in, the cardboard flaps up into the picture, or blows back down. A piece of rubbish, a remnant of the building's construction or renovation, it pops up like an invader, spoiling the symmetry and introducing a time element into a work that is otherwise mostly static. It is a bit too polished to be a structural film; it is more notable for calling on experimental tropes without conforming to them, a lot like Kiarostami's Five. But it certainly indicates that Rousseau (who has never been an ostentatious filmmaker) is entering a period of high reductionism.