Three Recent Films by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Patreon)

The somewhat anonymous Mexican experimental film group Colectivo Los Ingrávidos are astonishingly prolific. When one checks in with their Vimeo page, it's often the case that the group have posted a sudden spate of new works. Some of them are fully digital, while others at least originate on celluloid. But I think most observers agree that this relentless productivity comes at a cost. Los Ingrávidos works often display a remarkable tactility and an all-too-rare alchemy with respect to the colors and textures of film stock. But other works feel hurried, as if the group's political orientation led them to rush an idea through the compositional process, attempting to meet some self-imposed deadline of relevance. I certainly admire their project, and a number of their films, such as 2017's The Sun Quartet or 2021's Tonali, are among the most impressive experimental efforts of recent years. Still, it's impossible to keep up with them enough to always find the gems. They are the Takashi Miike of the avant-garde.

Three Ingrávidos films were featured at the IFFR in January, and while all are worth seeing, they also demonstrate some of the pitfalls of their working method. Seeds (2023), pictured above, is a kind of serialist work wherein each frame is a distinct variation of the same basic image. Every shot is anchored by a kernel of corn placed dead-center in the frame, but they are all slightly different in shape and orientation. The film seems to employ some form of color separation or dyeing process, because there is a unique undertone to each image, mostly in shades of red, blue, and purple. 

There is a rhythmic grinding on the soundtrack that resembles visual information moving over the projector's sound head. At the same time, the soundtrack is a bit too clean and tonal to have necessarily been generated in this manner. So it could be a tape-splice piece of an electronic composition. The approach is very reminiscent of the late Luther Price's work, but lacks his gritty, handmade feel. As the film notes explain, Seeds is a statement about agricultural sovereignty and against the genetic chicanery of Big Agra. So the purpose is indeed to give pride of place to the humble corn kernel as a metonym for Mexican self-reliance. But again, unlike Price's films, Seeds offers little variation across its ten-minute running time. It simply stakes out its territory and stays there.

The same organizational approach is also applied to Conmillos (2024), a film comprised of close-ups of various animal teeth. A bit like Brakhage's Mothlight, Conmillos retrieves organic material that was once alive and re-animates it with film. As the teeth whizz by, we cannot tell which creatures' remains we are examining, and the alternating black-on-white and white-on-black pattern produces a kind of calligraphy, the superimposed lines forming and unforming shapes and graphic forms. I was momentarily reminded of Jodie Mack's Wasteland films, which provide a similar catalog of natural objects. However, her films exhibit a clearer logic, and are composed to more carefully articulate a form of rhythmic motion. 

As with Seeds, Conmillos provides one thing after another for over ten minutes, with no real development. (As opposed to the more abstract soundtrack of the earlier film, this one is more obviously an electronic composition, comprised of the tolling of church bells.) Conmillos is consistently engaging, but it doesn't feel particularly temporal in its aims. It could have been half as long, or three times as long, with no significant difference.

The most compelling of the three Ingrávidos films is Ritual (2024), which achieves the most satisfying relationship between nature photography and nonrepresentational forms. Using optical printing to generate unstable superimpositions, the film combines dozens of shots of the sun in the sky. Given the color variations and the shifts in aperture, Ritual plays a game of push and pull with its subject, the lens sometimes producing intense flares of light, and at other times resolving into a series of small, flat discs of color.

Ritual's semi-random movement of shapes within a limited field of action, along with its skittering soundtrack, calls to mind the works of Len Lye and especially Normal McLaren. As those artists played with the limits of pure abstraction, often partaking of the accessible hues and patterns of commercial advertising, Ingrávidos seems to be turning the sun into a sprightly actor, so ever-present in its life-giving properties that we can treat it somewhat irreverently while still being reminded of its power. In this way, the historical and spiritual elements that one often finds in Ingrávidos' work, particularly their use of Aztec and Incan themes, is permitted to collide with the mostly secular, modernist forms of the Euro-American avant-garde, resulting in a pleasing tension. It's like Perrey and Kingsley covering Sun Ra.