Entrance Wounds (Calum Walter, 2023) (Patreon)

If you haven't yet read Phil Coldiron's piece in Cinema Scope #97, on the films of Ross Meckfessel, well, you should. But I mention it here because Phil's discussion of Meckfessel seems relevant to considering Calum Walter's latest film. The article describes open montage, an editing scheme that consciously avoids drawing close mental connections between subsequent images. What Meckfessel accomplished by doing this, I think, is the production of a kind of affective field, wherein the viewer senses possible emotional resonances among the images and sounds, but is also prohibited from drawing any sort of linear or causal chain. A gestalt is implied, but hovers just out of reach.

This has been an experimental mode that has gained greater currency over the past twenty years, and along with Meckfessel, I think we could cite other filmmakers who have operated in this vein: the late digital works of Phil Solomon seem relevant here, along with works by Mary Helena Clark, Michael Robinson, Jesse McLean, and indeed, Calum Walter. I was a bit mystified by the first of Walter's films I saw, 2015's Terrestrial. It struck me as a film that was striving for formal clarity but coming up short. Now, I am not so sure. His 2019 film Meridian, was in fact overtly linear -- a mechanical movement over a darkened body of water -- but seemed to emphasize opacity, the failure of surveillance technologies to render space comprehensible

Entrance Wounds initially implies that it is going to be "about" something: the ever-present threat of gun violence in the United States. Walter's opening shot, which is one of the most potent images I've seen in a long time, finds the filmmaker thumbing through a gun magazine in a supermarket. Upon finding an ad that depicts the reader as a first-person shooter, pointing the gun into the negative space beyond the page, Walter turns this invitation into a kind of symbolic invitation to stand in the shoes of a potential assailant. He whips the image around, pointing the "gun" at other shoppers.

Although Entrance Wounds includes other gun-centric imagery, mostly drawn from VR and videogames, the film is not an essay about the "gun problem." Instead, Walter is weaving its dangers into the overall fabric of daily life, where they of course reside. The film is steeped in winter images, with piles of snow engulfing patio furniture, or thin sheets of ice being plucked from a roof window, placed in front of the lens, and then thrown off the building to shatter. Most evocatively, Walter shows himself pulling icicles from the edge of the roof, but in reverse. These sharp objects heal themselves, dripping upward and reattaching themselves to the eaves. Snow and ice fill every available void, saturating the suburban Chicago atmosphere, but Entrance Wounds takes this natural occurrence and reconfigures it as a smothering kind of affect. We cannot prevent winter's chill, and we as a nation behave as if we cannot prevent deadly violence, as if it were somehow beyond human law.

In other shots, Walter shows us disconnected shots of groups of people milling around in slow motion, or a sequence from the film Gravity in which the astronauts played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney float and tumble through space, while the shadows of spectators fall upon the screen or block the projector beam. And while the nighttime shots of people standing in a field, unsure what to do, certainly suggests the many vigils held for those who have been struck down, there is also something provocatively unspecific about the material Walter has concatenated. Entrance Wounds conveys a global freeze, a narrative trapped in ice, as we waver between horror and numbness. It generates a feeling of logic suspended, as tragedy ceases to register as an event. Grief is amoebic. It fills the space around us like a deadly gas.