The Best Experimental Films (That I Saw) in 2022 (Patreon)

As with all such lists, a grain or two of salt is advisable. There are always more experimental films produced and released within a calendar year than can ever be watched by any given human being, regardless of how hard they may try. And in my case, I was unable to travel to any film festivals this year, so I have no doubt that I missed a few key titles along the way. But it’s the end of the year, lists are fun (pace Elena Gorfinkel), and so let’s do it anyway.

20. Sea Series 23 (John Price, Canada)

This is the latest installment of Price’s ongoing project, one that combines diaristic elements, portraiture, and formalist experimentation. In SS23, Price trains his camera on his children during a trip to the beach, allowing the viewer to infer the differences in personality between his daughter and son. A snapshot of an entire feeling, before it inevitably slips away. [Media City]

19. Oh, Butterfly! (Sylvia Schedelbauer, Germany)

Schedelbauer had virtually perfected her own unique mode of filmmaking, one comprised of fleeting images emerging from and receding into throbbing light. With her latest films, she breaks form and tries something almost entirely different. NYFF premiered her other 2022 film, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, a dynamic, four-dimensional montage of visual documents from the Japanese women’s movement. But I preferred Oh, Butterfly!, a film that adapts Puccini’s classic opera into a consideration the Western stereotyping of Asian women. Seamlessly linking dozens of different versions of “Un bel dì, vedremo,” Schedelbauer combines a critique of representation with a consideration of her own life as a biracial Japanese / German woman. A bold new direction from a major film artist. [Courtesy of the filmmaker.]

18. open sky / open sea / open ground (Martín Baus and Libertad Gills, Ecuador)

A potent miniature that considers the natural environment and humans’ place within it, this film by Baus (who also worked on Alexandra Cuesta’s Lungta) and Gills takes its coastal images and saturates them in a hazy sky blue, formally uniting the film’s three distinct ingredients. [Prismatic Ground]

17. Flora (Nicolás Pereda, Mexico / Canada)

A structuralist making-of document related to Fauna, Pereda’s last feature film, Flora examines the cultural demands too often made of Mexican media, in particular an Anglo fascination with narco culture. Although Flora suggests that the drug trade is an ever-present part of daily life, its imbrication with all forms of capital, including filmmaking itself, is more bothersome than glamorous. [NYFF]

16. Paradiso XXXI, 118 (Kamal Aljafari, Palestine / Germany)

A compact collage of material drawn from Israeli military training films, Paradiso is a nearly wordless demonstration of ideology at work. What is a desert, and who does it belong to? What does an enemy look like? Aljafari’s film is an examination of media pathology, and how it conditions those who will serve in the “world’s most moral army.” [Viennale]

15. gewesen sein wird / will have been (Sasha Pirker, Austria)

A cinematic tour of the apartment of Viennese artist Heinz Frank (1939-2020), as conducted by his daughter Lilli Breuer-Guttmann. Frank’s living space is a fascinating combination of two competing tendencies, the obsessive outsider and the rigid formalist. We see walls painted with faux wood-grain, stark surfaces that reveal hidden cabinets, sliding panels and revolving partitions, elements wondrous and bizarre yet all defined by modularity and function. The space, which also served as Frank’s studio, is a three-dimensional extension of his strange artistic sensibility. The apartment is a personal, hidden museum, one Breuer-Guttmann hopes to protect. [Viennale]

14. The Newest Olds (Pablo Mazzolo, Argentina / Canada)

A film commissioned by the Media City Film Festival, itself a joint initiative between the twin cities of Detroit, MI, and Windsor, ON, The Newest Olds is a rigorous explication of these two urban spaces and their relationships: natural, architectural, economic, and social. Easily the year’s best city film, Newest Olds expands Mazzolo’s ongoing project of using cinema to excavate the historical unconscious of a given location, those unseen forces that continue to shape our present-day reality. [TIFF / Media City]

13. Welcome and The Tomb of Kafka (Jean-Claude Rousseau, France)

Two short films by one of cinema’s most distinctive voices, both of Rousseau’s 2022 releases exhibit the structural puckishness of Ernie Gehr and the historical materialism of the late Jean-Marie Straub. In both films, we see a single camera set-up as it changes across time. Welcome gazes at an old building across the way, while Tomb finds JCR contemplating the view outside his modest hotel room, as ordinary objects move around the frame in the course of everyday use. Rousseau has never been an ostentatious filmmaker, but it appears that he is entering a period of exquisite reductionism. [FID Marseilles]

12. Lungta (Alexandra Cuesta, Ecuador / Mexico)

One of a number of films this year that worked with a single image of short passage of film in order to gradually expand it, Lungta eventually reveals its source material but not before blurring and distending it into complete abstraction. Cuesta produces something akin to a moving Rothko painting at first, as the unstable image temporarily resolves into hovering purple rectangles. The pattern gives way to a brief shot of an animal, impassively regarding Cuesta’s camera as it takes the burden of representation on its sturdy back. [NYFF / HCAF]

11. Hors-Titre (Wiame Haddad, France)

Several films this year worked to undermine our faith in the observational realism we naively associate with the movie camera. In Hors-Titre, Wiame Haddad makes a Super-8 film that stands in for a historical document that does not exist: an Algerian man exiting his small apartment in January of 1961, as people are taking to the streets to demand independence. Haddad exposes the filmmaking process, and we observe the tension between a creative fabrication and the intimate texture of small-gauge film, a medium we instinctively associate with the recording of private moments. [TIFF]

10. Light Signal (Emily Chao, U.S.)

A film that both describes a space both visually and textually, Light Signal is an ecological film, one that contemplates the relationship between human beings and the sea. She begins with a brief lecture on light and dark as possible parameters within the cinema itself. From there, Light Signal moves outward, into a broader consideration of illumination. Carefully editing a number of distinct locations into a single expansive landscape, Chao takes us to a secluded cabin, Alcatraz Island, and finally a lighthouse. This is significant because the fragmented text Chao has shared with us is taken from the log of Emily Fish, who was a lighthouse keeper in the final years of the 19th century. Light Signal calls to mind such filmmakers as Hollis Frampton, Morgan Fisher, and David Gatten, but Chao has sculpted her material into a statement all her own. [Crossroads / HCAF]

9. The Time That Separates Us (Parastoo Anoushahpour, Palestine / Jordan)

One of the best essay films of the year, The Time That Separates Us begins with nighttime images of the hills of Jordan on fire, as people look on uncertain what to do. Initially many of the film's images, shot along the Jordanian border, seem to be amateur recordings of tourists, merely descriptive of a place one has been. But as Anoushahpour's film progresses, we see that these shots are highly deliberate in their tremulous lack of clarity. Using folk tales, the Biblical story of Sodom, Google Images, and other disparate sources (including Lynda Benglis's notorious Artforum ad), The Time That Separates Us is a depiction not of the Holy Land but of the various systems of inscription that traverse and define it. Late in the film, Anoushahpour foregrounds the problem of translation, as we watch two people negotiate a text in Arabic and English, while the viewer is provided with English subtitles of the spoken Arabic, introducing a time disphasure in the process of understanding. One of the year's densest film works, it's also one of the richest, one that rewards repeat viewings. [TIFF]

8. Color Prism Suite #2: Withering Ends (Zack Parrinella, U.S.)

With its fast-paced conjuncture of color-coded images and synthesizer tones, Color Prism Suite #2hits the screen like a piece of visual music. But it’s the exact opposite of the kind of films that have become associated with that phrase. Unlike Jordan Belson or the Whitneys, Parrinella is not projecting non-objective color doodles. Instead, he is excising recognizable images from the outside world and circumscribing their denotative function. They are each associated with a musical note, and are grouped according to their dominant color. So in a sense, CPS#2 tries to do the impossible, by asking us not to see random street signs, painted walls, and scattered garbage, but to perceive harmonics and color temperature – a heroic act of phenomenological bracketing. But it’s okay; the filmmaker knows it’s a self-cancelling project, which is why it’s so fun. This is a film that British trickster John Smith might wish he’d made. [Crossroads / HCAF]

7. Heron 1954-2002 (Alexis McCrimmon, U.S.)

Definitely the best film I saw at 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 fragments of onscreen text (taken from the subject’s autopsy report) with 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 uses color-printing distortion to warm and distend actual photos of Heron, suggesting the elasticity and the inevitable dissipation of memory. A major discovery. [Prismatic Ground / HCAF]

6. Maria Schneider, 1963 (Elisabeth Subrin, U.S. / France)

Another film that delves into the archive, Maria Schneider, 1963 finds Subrin re-filming part of an interview that the actress gave on French TV. Schneider bristles at some of the questions, particularly those focused on her notorious role in Last Tango in Paris opposite Marlon Brando. Three different actresses – Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval – each deliver the same lines (mostly), allowing for differences in race and nationality to complicate the material’s already-fraught assumptions about gender and representation. 

(Suggestion for Grasshopper Films: this would be an amazing film to pair with Alain Gomis’s Rewind and Play when you release it next year.) [NYFF]

5. Against Time (Ben Russell, U.S. / France)

This is a film in two complementary parts from one of contemporary cinema’s great travelers. The first part (“Red”) includes an independence day celebration in Belarus, screening in reverse (fireworks un-bursting in the night sky); a punk club in Vilnius with a DJ who appears, at least in part, to be a mannequin; and a brisk trek through the Carpathian Mountains. The second part (“Blue”) combines kaleidoscopic images of the city of Marseilles with a close-up portrait of a baby who, in true Brakhage style, seems to be coming into visual consciousness right before our eyes. A flickering memory, a city-symphony of home and away, Against Time is above all a tender goodbye to Ben’s friend Jonathan Schwartz, who left us far too soon. [FID Marseilles / NYFF]

4. NE Corridor (Joshua Solondz, U.S.)

I've already written about this film elsewhere, but it bears repeating. Solondz, by consciously paying homage to the late punk-structuralist Luther Price, has found his own way to negotiate Price's scratched, hole-punches, image-within-image collage bits, and painterly expressionism. Where Price's work often employed found footage to foreclose space, generating a sense of the walls of the world closing in, Josh opens things up, inviting in confusion, eroticism, and quite a bit of humor. [NYFF / HCAF]

3. After Work (Céline Condorelli and Ben Rivers, U.K.)

The audiovisual construction of a neighborhood, as Rivers’ camera observes municipal labor, Condorelli’s sculptural objects coax meaning from the shape of partially-forged playground equipment, with the words of Jay Bernard holding it all together as a poetic sinew. How do we talk about labor when our free time has been coopted into secondary production – the so-called attention economy, in which even watching a critical film-essay constitutes the generation of capital? And are the spaces afforded to children for their playtime serving as instruments of discipline, directing leisure through specific predetermined channels? A provocative film, both aesthetically and intellectually. [TIFF]

2. urban solutions (Arne Hector, Vinicius Lopes, Luciana Mazeto, Minze Tummescheit, Brazil / Germany)

I’ve complained recently about the sudden abundance of essay films, partly because so many of them betray a lack of trust in images and sounds but also the viewer. Text too often becomes a way of guiding us through a specific set of interpretive moves, making sure we “get it.” Just like After Work, urban solutions is a film whose use of language opens up new avenues of meaning instead of closing them down.

The filmmakers offer a critical geography of Brazil, showing how capitalism and political paranoia have produced an internal security state, with the upper and middle classes going to ever greater lengths to protect themselves against the perceived threat of the urban poor. But as urban solutions makes clear, this fortification relies on the working class itself, who are hired as doormen and security guards and are expected to defend private property against the have-nots. In painstaking detail, urban solutions shows us how class antagonisms are inscribed within the cityscape itself. As a refrain, we hear from a European landscape painter who tries to “civilize” the Brazilian jungle through strict visual classification. In this way, urban solutions examines two different but interconnected histories of control. [Viennale / NYFF]

1. Instant Life (Anja Dornieden, Juan David González Monroy, and Andrew Kim, Germany)

Dornieden and González Monroy have worked for years under the collective moniker Ojoboca, and like several of my other favorite films this year (by Haddad, Pirker, and Subrin), Instant Life is an act of cinematic sleight of hand. It purports to offer us a set of iterations of a film from 1941 called Instant Life. With its churning early-BFI synthesizer soundtrack (already a tip that things are not as they seem), the first film delivers an unspecific collection of scientific “wonders,” such as the formation of crystals, stalactites, hot springs, and all manner of micro- and macro-geophysical phenomena.

In the second version, the filmmakers offer a few more hints as to the fictive, handmade nature of the film, but add a series of cryptic texts that form a riddle about what force we may be watching at work. The “I” describes itself as small, powerful, invisible, living and inert, leading us to wonder what Instant Life is really about. Then, in the third and final version, a voice (filmmaker Alee Peoples) explains that the Instant Life project is a lie, and that its makers have undertaken fairly banal science-class experiments in order to produce a fake sense of “the sublime,” a space in which the viewer can surrender their subjectivity and identify with raw matter itself. A gentle rebuke to the “new materialist” ideas currently in vogue, Instant Life delivers the bad news. There’s no escape from our humanity, at least not in this life. [Berlinale / Prismatic Ground]

Also very much worth seeking out:

Darkness, Darkness, Burning Bright: Prelude and Oraison (Gaëlle Rouard, France)

The Demands of Ordinary Devotion (Eva Giolo, Belgium / Italy)

EVENTIDE (Sharon Lockhart, U.S.)

Exhibition (Mary Helena Clark, U.S.)

F1ghting Looks Different 2 Me Now (Fox Maxy, U.S.)

Moire / Écume (Maxime Hot, France)

Object Permanence (Alex Blevins, U.S.)

Puerta a puerta (Jessica Sarah Rinland and Luis Arnías, U.S. / Mexico / Venezuela)

The Sky’s in There (Dani and Sheilah ReStack, U.S. / Canada)

Vecino Vecino (Camila Galaz, Chile)