A Sense of Nothing (Francisco Rojas, 2024) (Patreon)

Rojas' last film, A Sea of Glass, was one of my favorite films from 2023, and I fessed up to the fact that I wanted to program it in my Houston show, but was worried its length would be too daunting for the audience. As if answering my hesitancy with an elegant, pristine "screw you," Rojas has produced A Sense of Nothing, a film every bit as exquisite as A Sea of Glass. It is silent and almost purely abstract, but clocks in at only four minutes. (Yes, I am kidding about Francisco's motivations. Nevertheless, I am committing, right here and now, to screening it in November.)

Where the 23-minute Glass was rather oceanic, a field of light in which to lose oneself, A Sense of Nothing is a finely cut jewel, a film with an observable structure in which the attentive viewer can find their way. Admittedly, it was only on the third viewing that this pattern really clicked for me, although I think I understood in intuitively. I am tempted to say that Rojas has shaped it like cyclically, but that word seems somehow at odds with the prismatic elements that fill out the film's basic armature.

Beginning with a screen of solid red, Nothing soon turns to a vaguely seafoam colored daylight yellow. The moving camera warps the light into horizontal, then vertical forms. After this, rounded lens flares fill the screen, shifting the visuals from linear to circular. But within this segment, we catch brief glimpses of tree branches and the ocean. There identifiable forms almost "zap" into place, as if Rojas' film were glitching. But actually, these moments of clarity merely confirm our suspicions about the scenes before Rojas' lens, so that when Nothing returns to abstraction, we are inclined to see these shapes rather differently.

At this point, Nothing turns blue: deep blue color fields, striped light, and ocean waves. Although Rojas does not exactly reiterate the earlier, yellowish shapes, a definite pattern emerges, although it cycles through much more quickly. Shortly after this, the flares return, but with a new clarity and insistence. Circles are banded with prismatic light, a series of tremulous rainbows that turn the otherwise intangible light into something concrete. This is solidified when Rojas reintroduces intersecting diagonal lines, a bit like a window frame. 

This in turn sets the stage for a brief coda, which reintroduces the red tone from the start of the film. We see shaken stripes of red light, echoing the earlier passages of yellow and blue, and although this pattern is not exactly regular, like a round or a palindrome, we become conscious of it as something we have observed recently, in a slightly different way. 

Initially I was a bit confused by Rojas' choice of title. Is it ironic? We not only see actual objects in A Sense of Nothing, but the film works hard to lend physicality to these fugitive light impressions, and they often resolve into hard, geometric entities. But perhaps I was too focused on the "nothing" -- the optical void that many folks perceive abstract film as reflecting -- and not focused enough on the "sense." Once again we can recognize Rojas' historical influences, particularly Brakhage. And like many Brakhage films, the visual phenomena in A Sense of Nothing are suspended in indeterminacy, always promising to coalesce but always on the move to some other shape. Our cognition is usually a split second behind this film, and yet we do in fact organize it in our memory. We can never truly see "nothing," because our brain is a machine for making sense.