Prismatic Ground -- the rest of it, part one (Patreon)

Promised Lands (Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2018)

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa was a Ugandan artist who'd spent the last several years based in the U.K. Her work had been gaining greater exposure in the last few years. I discovered her when reading a transcript of an artists' roundtable in which she participated, along with Fox Maxy and Sky Hopinka, for Art News. Sadly, she passed away this past January, following a long chronic illness. Her passing no doubt precipitated Inney's inclusion of her best-known work, Promised Lands, in this year's festival. If I'd been more aware of all this, I would have mentioned this tribute screening in my Film Comment piece, along with Michael Snow and Takahiko Iimura.

The visual base of Promised Lands is a contiuous 20-minute shot of the sun setting through a clearing in the trees. Against this unbroken time structure, EWW introduces both an audio collage and a series of onscreen words and statements. Much of the verbiage is taken from the writings of a 19th century Austrio-Hungarian economist named Theodor Hertzka, who went to Africa to establish an intentional community for European immigrants called Freeland. On the soundtrack, we hear fragments of a conversation between EWW and her uncle, Patrick Wanambwa, who takes his niece around the area where the settlement was. It's a highly dialogic piece, its various elements in continual argument as the sun finally sets on the colonialist dream.

Coaley Peak (A Fragment) (Dan Guthrie, 2022)

Like Promised Lands, Guthrie's Coaley Peak is a film that allows language to perform a great deal of its conceptual work. But perhaps owing to the nature of the piece, Coaley Peak is not quite as successful. Guthrie explains that what we are seeing was meant to be the last shot in a much longer film, one that involved returning to a significant locale in his past. In the main image above, we see Guthrie holding a photo up to the landscape, in a perspective that allows the two visual modes -- representation and reality -- to appear in the same scale. The actual shot is only a few seconds, and Guthrie presents it in an ongoing loop, playing forwards and backwards, over and over again. The shot is "ruined" by the film having being exposed to light before processing, and in a way, Guthrie uses this as his dominant metaphor. The past can never be duplicated, and when we try, there will be inevitable artifacts caused by the attempt.

I Cannot Now Recall (Kersti Jan Werdal, 2023)

Not necessarily one of the "best" films of the festival, but definitely one of my favorites, I Cannot Now Recall is a conceptual piece that is executed very well, and it makes me want to catch up with her longer film from 2021, Lake Forest Park. Like that film, I Cannot Now Recall uses the anodyne environments of suburbia as a backdrop, and here the result is a bit like imaginary entr'actes from a Gus Van Sant film -- possibly Elephant, but more likely Paranoid Park. This is a modular film composed of single-shot readings (or in some cases, performances) of excerpts from Yvonne Rainer's journals. In each case, Rainer describes a dream she had. As you might expect, Rainer's dreams are a surreal amalgam of aesthetic, sexual, and political themes, but this abstruse content is solidified by Rainer's plainspoken prose. In its organization, I Cannot Now Recall reminds me quite a bit of Ephraim Asili's 2017 film Fluid Frontiers, although the two films could hardly less similar in tone.

Tous les jours de Mai (Miryam Charles, 2023)

This poignant miniature functions a bit like a postscript to Charles' 2022 feature Cette Maison, although it is certainly worthy in its own right. Both films address the anguish of a mother whose young daughter has been murdered, the victim having been Charles' cousin. Where the feature film employs recreations and time rifts to produce a haunted portrait of trauma, Tous les jours de Mai consists of a few shots off the coast of Quebec, near where the crime occurred. We hear the voice of the mother, reflecting on the fact that time continues to lurch forward, but it doesn't seem to be carrying her along with it. Anchored on the left by a red light-leak line and a sprocket hole, Tous les jours visually conveys the temporal dissonance of traumatized experience. The waves lap against the boats, yet the celluloid partly cancels the illusion of movement. I'm very impressed with this recent direction in Charles' work, and I'm very pleased about the exposure she's receiving right now.

Yaangna Plays Itself (Adam Piron, 2023)

With a title that;s a riff on Thom Andersen's riff on Joe Gage, Yaangna Plays Itself begins with a title crawl taken from a historical marker at the corner of Commercial Street and Vignes in L.A. The text, written in 2019 by Chief Ernie P. Tautimez-Salas, explains that the site was once the home of a sycamore tree known as El Aliso, which was of great spiritual significance to the Kizh people who originally lived in present-day Los Angeles. Since Piron's film is, in essence, a document of an absence, it stands to reason that he would choose to absorb the physical aspects of the site that time cannot entirely erode. Yaangna Plays Itself is a materialist film, comprised of scratches, flares, and a pinhole-like recording of a changing moon. Piron states in the end titles that "this film was shot and sourced from unceded Tongva lands," and I take "sourced" to mean that Yaangna was exposed to the elements at that corner. Perhaps the celluloid was buried; maybe it was dragged along the land in order to register its terrain; possibly Piron exposed raw stock to the available light. But could no doubt ask Piron exactly how he made his film, but I'm not sure I want to. It is obvious that Yaangna is a registration of a particular place, its natural components interacting directly with the film's chemistry. But not knowing how this happened seems to maintain the appropriate distance between me, a viewer, and the concrete inscriptions of an irretrievable past.