Kevin Jerome Everson: Cinema and the Practice of Everyday Life

"Rooted so firmly in African-American settings that any appearance of a white person comes as a surprise (in itself a substantial political act), Everson’s films obsessively fixate on the everyday, offering immersive depictions of people working, passing time in their neighborhoods, running errands, going to the doctor, fixing their cars, and enjoying brief respites of leisure. These slivers of quotidian activity stand on their own as “complete” cinematic subjects, not mere fragments of larger narrative scaffolding, and the plainly descriptive titles of Everson’s films speak to his unwavering conviction in the seemingly undramatic minutes and seconds that mainstream cinema—or, for that matter, even a wide swatch of documentary and avant-garde cinema—routinely passes over as unworthy of prolonged attention."

The Harvard Film Archive is hosting a formidable retrospective of the films of Kevin Jerome Everson this winter. I spent my September and October consuming and researching the man's work and contributed the entirety of the program notes for the series, which can be found here. Everson's a highly unique figure. I don't think there's anyone quite like him on the contemporary scene. He makes films that almost necessitate accompanying texts to make sense of, and I hope what I've done here suffices.

A First Exposure to the Films of Timoleon Wilkins...

As subjects, roiling water surfaces and bokeh are fairly played out in lyrical/personal/diaristic 16mm Bolex filmmaking. That Timoleon Wilkins manages something like a fresh take on them says a great deal about the level of his sensitivity. Among other things, Los Caudales (2005) features dozens of seagull’s-eye view close-ups of lapping water on high-contrast black-and-white reversal stock, the resultant image a defamiliarizing dance of bright white dots and squiggles on a jet-black surface. Parts of Quartet (In Camera) (2009) study permutations of light photographed through telephoto lenses, and instead of an anarchic sprawl of light blobs, Wilkins achieves something closer to the balletic choreography of Len Lye’s films, albeit in a far more muted and unpredictable register. It bears mentioning that this is only a fragment of the material Wilkins finds fit to turn his camera toward.

Educated under the tutelage of Stan Brakhage at the University of Colorado and far from quiet about his admiration for and familiarity with filmmakers like Nathaniel Dorsky, Bruce Baillie, and Bruce Conner, Wilkins sits pretty squarely in the romantic tradition of avant-garde cinema, the strand of underground filmmaking that valorizes the cameraman as a soloist with a unique ability to imprint his or her own subjectivity on the camera eye. Up to a point, Wilkins benefits from the acknowledgment of such ancestry. For one, it’s part of what brought him to Boston in the first place, Dorsky being the relatively fashionable commodity that he is, at least in the bone-dry marketplace of contemporary experimental cinema. (Rob Todd’s continuing obscurity, on the other hand, needs to be corrected.)



Still, Wilkins’ work creates distinct impressions. The most conspicuous of these is tied to his status as a lifelong citizen of the West (Colorado, Mexico, and Los Angeles are the touch points I’m aware of), the landscapes of which inflect his films to a significant degree. If Peter Hutton’s New York Portraits, sublime as they can be, are quintessential expressions of the cramped geography of the East Coast, Wilkins’ films achieve something similarly archetypal with regards to the openness of the West. Big skies, sacred-seeming cloud formations, vast plains, elongated highways, wandering cattle, and vast beaches are all subject to scrutiny. Land merges into sky, thunderstorms erupt (or are merely implied to erupt through inspired aperture futzing), and Wilkins’ camera follows telephone lines along the highway as if to celebrate the freedom of movement afforded by the landscape. In my own experiences out West, such ample space means feeling liberated from staying too long in one place; movement becomes a texture of life.

Made between 1998 and 2010, Lake of the Spirits, Los Caudales, The Crossing, Quarter, and, especially, Drifter—all of which were shown at the Harvard Film Archive’s recent tribute to Wilkins—evoke this restlessness. Four of them are silent, yet the dynamism of their montage and the diversity of their images generates a tone more exploratory than contemplative. Intermittent flashes of bright light (or perhaps merely blank leader, it’s hard to tell) act as optical refreshment as well as ways to transition between rushes of abstraction (bokeh, light leaks, water surfaces, objects photographed and/or processed in such a way that they become unidentifiable) and sections of documentary-like observation (flowers, landscapes, sparingly used human faces). In posing these two representational extremes side by side, Wilkins is constantly seeking their points of intersection, the moments where the banal turns into something magical. Edited largely in-camera—that is, conceived as a linear flow of images in conjunction with the filming stage—these films are therefore documents of Wilkins’ thought processes while shooting them—the flickering of his consciousness, if you will. And they are unbelievably beautiful.

Flattening History: Some Notes on the Films of Nicolas Rey

I spent a welcome chunk of the past weekend with the work of French experimental filmmaker Nicolas Rey, who made a stop in Boston on his brief US tour. Intrigued by Differently, Molussia (2012) from a distance based on the rumblings of MUBI and Cinema Scope during the film's festival run, I was sufficiently curious as to how the film gestating in my mind would match up with the real thing, knowing, oddly enough, that the film I was about to see would actually not be the same film seen by the writers I was reading months before. Differently, Molussia's unusual and (I suspected) gimmicky exhibition quirk – its 9 reels are randomized before projection via card flips – nearly guaranteed that the ordering of this feature-length film essay would be different than before, potentially even unprecedented in the film's screening history (there are a whopping 362,880 possibilities). The purpose of this serendipitous maneuver, I would wager, is to frustrate the spectator's impulse to both evaluate a clear beginning and end and process a logical structure enclosing the events occurring in the film. (Rey's odd, discordant sound design – which is developed entirely in post and ignores the assumption, built into the majority of cinema, that a corresponding soundtrack must be tethered to the very beginning of a corresponding shot – works similarly.) A subsequent viewing of Schuss! (2007) confirmed Rey's desire to refuse the viewer a stable orientation within his film world; made up of 9 or 10 chapters (I can't remember exactly) that are spaced out in achronological order, the film's a jostled and discursive look at a number of interrelated stories around a French ski resort of which the viewer is ultimately tasked with making heads or tails.

Rey's films are about key technological, industrial, political, and aesthetic developments in the 20th century—obliquely so in Differently, Molussia and directly so in Schuss!. His structuring principles, meanwhile, encourage the viewer to see everything as eternally relevant; they flatten the course of history into a dense whole in which the happenings of a seemingly distant past exist alongside and inflect or affect (cinematically and otherwise) the movements of the present. This idea is worked out formally in both films. In Schuss!, found footage of idyllic skiing vacations from the early 1900s is rephotographed and processed in 16mm using the same techniques Rey incorporates into his contemporary Alps footage, visually homogenizing the two time periods. In Differently, Molussia, a liberal "adaptation" of Günther Anders' as-yet-untranslated German novel The Molussian Catacomb, Rey conjures up defamiliarized images of contemporary Germany to parallel the imaginary totalitarian State described by Anders in 1931, both Rey's images and Anders' words simultaneously communicating with and commenting upon their authors' respective presents.

Both films share a nondescript visual palette, a habit of draining the physical world of its specificity and vigor – movement within the frame, color saturation, and cultural signifiers are largely dispensed with – until it takes on a naked, protean quality. Differently, Molussia takes this drabness to a hypnotic extreme: everything is gray and weathered, signs of life are kept to a minimum, and the buildings that protrude from this ashen wasteland all reflect a steely, brutalist design sensibility. Emphasized by Rey's sturdy, unmoving long shots, the landscape has a heavy permanence to it; when coupled with narrated excerpts from Anders' writing (stories of ineffectual human resilience to authoritarian conduct), a sense of unconquerable malignance is layered into the environment itself. Schuss!, though comparatively visually varied (in terms of sources alone, there are Rey's contemporary images of the ski resort, the early found footage, optically printed text scrolls, patches of pure abstraction, and dated footage at an aluminum manufacturing plant), is marked by a similar consistency. One of the film's recurring motifs is the rhythmic intrusion of second-long blips of black leader in the middle of extended scenes. The afterimages that are created from this disruptive editing scheme linger in the eye until the next shot commands the optical attention; applied throughout the film to different temporal sections, this technique creates a sense of different eras of history bleeding into one another.



Schuss!'s title (translated as "shot") refers to a term French skiers use to describe a speedy downhill descent, a fitting analogy for the way in which Rey analyzes the course of the 20th century in these films. Without becoming outright environmentalist screeds, they lament the steady corruption of nature by capitalist forces. They look at how landscapes are coded with a century of power struggles between civilians and those in power. In this context, aluminum (the machine-based production of which dominates the Alps setting of Schuss!) becomes a symbolically loaded material. Its onscreen and offscreen uses include (but are not limited to): skis, ski boots, chairlifts, firearms, cars, snow-blowers, the structure of the manufacturing plant owner's mountain home, the structures of the buildings in the totalitarian landscape of Differently, Molussia, film cameras, and film canisters and reels. One of the achievements of Rey's work is first to detect the world as a result of a dizzying sequence of economic and political decisions made over a large period of time, and then to recognize everyone as somehow complicit in a process that slowly corrodes the Earth and drives us out of touch with the organic, the tactile, and the handmade.

Implicit in this critique is the question of the fate of another manufacturing industry spawned in the final decade of the 1800s: celluloid. Whereas aluminum has only grown in its relevance and variety of uses, film stock has become increasingly marginalized. Rey's films would seem to argue that this is because of celluloid's element of difficulty, its identity as a time-consuming, hands-on medium in an age of technological speed and efficiency. Thus, its use here becomes a politically involved act (as it so often tends to in the 21st century), albeit one that differs radically in tone from those which Rey's films subtly attack. These films, aesthetically speaking, are engineered towards openness. They completely respect the unique space of the viewer, trusting that he or she will arrange the visual information in their own special way. In one of the most gorgeous moments of Differently, Molussia, the camera surveys an overcast valley in a continuous tilt-and-pan movement; throughout, the thick dancing grain of Rey's outdated stock nearly overpowers the image's representative components, and in some instances becomes indistinguishable from the precipitation coming from the sky. It's a mysterious, enthralling abstraction brought about by the medium's particularities, and its effect is miles from the machine-like (totalitarian?) rigidity of the digital image. In such cases, the values of Rey's work are not directed or expounded upon, but rather felt.

Intensifying the Affect: Peter Tscherkassky’s Virtuosic Repurposing Acts

(Note: The following is the last paper I ever wrote at Emerson College, an essay for my History of Experimental and Avant-Garde seminar.)

Looking for a world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization.
                -Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "What is Phenomenology?"

Substitute “world” with “film” and one has a fairly instructive credo for digesting the work of Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky (1958 - present). Since his first short film in 1981, Tscherkassky has sought increasingly imaginative ways of transcending conventional pictorial representation in cinema, producing radical aesthetic experiences that intentionally gesture towards visual coherence before completely unsettling any sense of spectatorial stability. Provocatively touted as “the most important and most internationally celebrated contemporary avant-garde filmmaker,” (Möller) much of his work has been the subject of psychoanalytic and philosophical analysis, but the films explored in this essay – Motion Picture (1984), L'Arrivée (1997/98), Outer Space (1999), Dream Work (2001), and Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005) – suggest a desire to move beyond constricting modes of thought towards a new iteration of what Germaine Dulac deemed Cinéma pur; that is, a cinema with expressive qualities divorced from those of the other art forms based on “the power of the image alone” (34). Even as these films toy with structural framing devices, historically and theoretically loaded found footage material, and broader trends in the history of Austrian avant-garde cinema, their continual focus on material vulnerability reflects a larger interest in the fragility of various frameworks of thinking.

For the greater part of Tscherkassky’s career, this pursuit of pure cinema, absolute film, or immersive abstraction – whichever you prefer – has been tied to the photographic dark room. Starting with Motion Picture, Tscherkassky has been devoutly tied to celluloid film stock (both 16mm and 35mm) and hand processing (developing his film using his own chemicals and his own special methods). Integrating dark room manipulation of found footage stock into each of his works, not to mention producing his films entirely in this way for over a decade, Tscherkassky scratches, smudges, distorts, reprints, rephotographs, and multiplies his source material, in the process often abandoning any trace of the traditional point-and-shoot recording process that marks the vast majority of film production. Much of this work is accomplished with an optical printer, a device that allows one to scrutinize and maneuver individual film frames. Other times, Tscherkassky’s manipulation is entirely hands-on, in which case the effects seen in the finished films are produced through direct physical contact (abrasive or controlled) with the celluloid.

An Evening with Sami van Ingen

On the surface, the three films shown by the Balagan screening series on Monday, April 1st in Cambridge, Massachusetts to celebrate the work of Finnish artist Sami van Ingen – Texas Scramble (1996), Deep Six (2007), and Fokus (2004) – don’t seem to come from the same filmmaker. “We wanted to show some of the different sides of Sami’s work,” explained programmer Mariya Nikiforova when probed about the diversity of the screening. Her simple answer hinted at even further realms of variation within van Ingen’s twenty years’ worth of work unexplored by this particular program. Indeed, these three films alone embody lyrical, diaristic, self-reflexive, deconstructive, anthropological, personal documentary, and structuralist impulses.

Texas Scramble, the first film in the program, is the most conspicuous outlier of the three. The film opens with an onscreen text taken from Buddhist verse that proves the poetic guiding logic for van Ingen’s otherwise seemingly free-associative structure: “what we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday/our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow/our life is the creation of our mind.” The quote hints at motifs of circularity, renewal, repetition, and memory, and van Ingen proceeds to build these ideas into the film’s fluid form, which behaves according to visual echoes, rhythmic matches (both sonic and pictorial), and subtle loops. Over the course of 21 minutes, a diegetic memory starts to set in. Camera movements, shadows, and reflections seem haunted by previous parallels, mirroring human memory and the phenomenon of déjà vu.

The psychological curiosity and frenetic movement (always suggesting the presence of a human behind the camera) of Texas Scramble is worlds apart from the naked formalism and clever self-reflexivity of Deep Six. Cannibalizing a sequence featuring a logging truck barreling down an empty highway in Sidney J. Furie’s 1998 action thriller The Rage, van Ingen displays an almost fetishistic interest in movement and speed for its own sake. The footage quickly sheds any trace of narrative baggage as van Ingen shifts the CinemaScope image out of alignment to reveal dark frame lines, approximating the effect of an old television set skipping out of proper calibration. Playfully, van Ingen uses a spacious format touted as the most complete viewing experience only to violently disrupt any sense of unabated immersion in the spectacle. In the end, this formal breakdown is tied to the fate of the truck, whose piles of timber come crashing out of the truck bed on a particularly narrow turn.



Fokus, the final film in the program as well as van Ingen’s most widely shown work, shares with Deep Six an interest in obsessively teasing out latent moods and ideas in previously existing material. In this case, van Ingen recycles fifty-year-old color footage taken by his grandmother at her wedding ceremony in India. Van Ingen was not yet born when these images were shot, but he did spend his youth in Southern India due to his father’s heritage, and as such the film represents an effort to parse deeper into his ancestral history and cultural inheritance. Using an optical printer, van Ingen enlarges and slows these images to put them under intense scrutiny. Sometimes this results in discoveries that could only be made under such careful viewing circumstances: wedding rituals and processions start to take on a level of absurdity, while hierarchies of power within the ceremony are pulled into sharp, unsettling focus. Other times, van Ingen defamiliarizes – if not completely obscures – these images beyond recognition so that they crumble into a mass of earthy, colorful film grain spreading like lava across the screen. Van Ingen’s rising-and-falling low-frequency drones further encourage the contemplative atmosphere.

It’s obvious that van Ingen’s an eclectic filmmaker capable of working expressively with a number of experimental approaches. Balagan’s recent program likely only scratches the surface of an oeuvre that hopefully contains further variations on the disparate textures, structures, and meditations presented here. Fokus and Deep Six share obvious technical affinities, but that is to say nothing of their differing thematic impulses (one being a formal exercise in spectacle and the projection apparatus and the other being an excursion into familial history) or the fact that they do little to shed light on a film as mysteriously intimate as Texas Scramble. Thanks to Balagan, at least we can get a glimpse of this Finnish talent’s cluster of interests.

DIY Dystopia

Balagan Films of Cambridge, Massachusetts represents what is currently the heroic norm in avant-garde cinema curation and exhibition: a not-for-profit operation scouring the world for distinctive aesthetic experiences while relying on crowdsourcing to scrape enough funds together to just barely survive. At Balagan’s latest program – their first after an abnormal hiatus of several months – the staff’s repeated plugging (self-consciously described by head curator Jeff Silva as “beating a dead horse”) of their soon-to-expire Kickstarter came across less as cash-happy beggary than as an unfortunate necessity, an earnest plea for assistance better to get out of the way up front and move on to what really matters: the moving images.

The films in this latest program, which was entitled “DIY Dystopia” and ran approximately an hour and a half, are associated by their shared concerns over the state of the natural world in an increasingly jeopardized industrial landscape. An additional charge of immediacy is attached to this theme when considering that all of the filmmakers involved – Douglas Urbank, Jennifer Reeves, Christina Battle, Dan Baker, and Ben Rivers – are currently based in cities; an intensely “artificial” environment, as one Balagan curator noted. (Dante’s Quartet (1987), a film by the late Stan Brakhage, was also featured in the lineup, and he too spent a great deal of his life in an urban center.) Incorporating a blend of traditional shooting, hand-painting, optical printing, found footage manipulation, and other esoteric uses of celluloid, the films not only seek unpredictable methods for representing the contemporary environmental crisis but also tie this lament into the decay of material cinema as a larger practice and as a way of seeing.

Boston local Douglas Urbank’s in-progress found footage film WWII kicked off the evening accompanied by a live score from acoustic improv trio Duck That, a hissing, squelching, howling exercise in sustained tension that eerily matched the images of dead soldiers being carted to and fro in wheelbarrows and Nazi officials gathering in chunks. In fact, the otherworldly rattle emanating from Duck That’s shadowy corner beneath the screen – blown through woodwinds, gargled through loudspeakers, and punctuated by the sounds of unidentifiable trinkets – threatened to divert the attention away from Urbank’s somewhat dryly repurposed imagery, in which the only conspicuous marks of deconstruction are animated shifting tear lines and rows of circular negative space, implemented as if to suggest the footage crumbling and splitting apart.


The next film, Jennifer Reeves’ Landfill 16 (2011), offered a far more dense and mysterious visual surface. Presumably a tattered amalgamation of direct painting/scratching and less controlled manners of celluloid handling (i.e. burying in the dirt), the resulting visual chaos alternately evokes bubbling magma, eroded rust, and scorched Earth. The film’s weather-beaten color palette – resembling that of late-period Tony Scott – mutates as frequently as the textured surface, pulsating inward and outward in a mess of scratches, blotches, and Petri dish patterns. Towards the latter half of the film, barely legible images of wildlife begin emerging beneath this layered visual noise, marking the first instance of a rather didactic gesture that repeats throughout these films: the posing of a contrast between technology/human waste and seemingly untainted nature. (Landfill 16’s ambient soundtrack, which pits together distant industrial noises and ghostly field recordings, forges the same dialectic.)

Christina Battle’s Buffalo Lifts (2004) packs similarly hypnotizing imagery into its concise three-minute running time: an extended shot of a buffalo herd moving, significantly, from right to left that is nearly overwhelmed by the calculated destruction of the film’s surface. Here, a particularly punchy metaphor is raised regarding the simultaneous degradation of the natural world and physical cinema. As the buffalo charge insistently across the frame – their mere directionality subliminally invoking degeneration – they rush towards extinction, just as the celluloid they have been captured with is combusting around them, reducing them to strokes of pure movement. The film’s silence underscores its power; no frivolous elements are needed for such a harmonious matching of form and content.


Battle is also responsible for Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road and 97th Street (2002), a work of similar brevity and potency. The film’s focal point is an image of a silhouetted oil derrick bobbing slowly in and out of the ground, but it’s by no means a very descriptive shot. Instead, the methodical motion of the drill is reduced to a graphic cadence in the frame around which the detritus of burnt, dirty film stock gathers. Through rephotographing techniques, Battle shows the image being knocked out of alignment with the projector, a sudden boundary obstruction that echoes the derrick’s disruption of the line between land and sky. As in Buffalo Lifts, neither the Earth nor celluloid can survive such exploitation of the natural world.

Dan Baker finds a lovely image for this inherent doom of nature in the face of man-made extravagance in Transaension (2006), which the filmmaker claims is about fossil fuel extraction: a human figure, burning like the sun in the bottom right corner of the frame, dwarfed by a fog of fiery abstraction, stacked up like layers of compromised geological crusts above him. It’s a fleeting image, but it’s undeniably the most resonant of the show. Baker pushes past some of the simple-minded dichotomies permeating the rest of the films to arrive at a crystallization of human resilience against its own self-destructive tendencies. The rest of the sex-minute film is spent building up a hellish miasma of red and orange blotches and spiderweb scratches suggesting cracked rock, all set to a menacing low-frequency drone; this is human progress as an inescapable nightmare, not something to be pondered or lightly questioned.

Alongside these relatively low-profile works, Balagan curators thought it fitting to conclude the program with films by Stan Brakhage and Ben Rivers, two artists already somewhat well known for their expressions of a pastoral ideal. Dante’s Quartet, a hand-painted assault structured around Dante’s four stages of afterlife, and Ah, Liberty! (2008), another of Rivers’ monochrome, cinemascope explorations of human communion with nature, provided a rather serene ending to the dystopia presented by the other films. Two Years at Sea, Rivers' first feature-length work, was one of my key discoveries in 2011 and remains one of my favorite films of the decade so far, and this short, Rivers' very first release according to IMDB, works in a similar vein. Naturally lit black-and-white images of wildlife mix with a score comprised mostly of diegetic sounds, but here Rivers brushes up against narrative and genre elements. The film's premise is simple: a seemingly pure landscape becomes host to a series of increasingly bizarre human interferences culminating in a pair of hooded toddlers beating and swatting mindlessly at the wreckage left by an earlier brush fire. These odd staged bits rest somewhere between horror and absurdism, but the overall tone lands on the lighter side largely because of Rivers' inspired use of the spacious 2:35:1 format, which creates an inherently freeing composition; even in an ostensible close-up, there's a great deal of image for the eye to explore.

It's easy to wonder whether the Brakhage short was included merely for the sake of contrasting a current, politically charged approach to handmade film with an older, more metaphysical one. Otherwise, Brakhage's short seems out of place in the context of all these self-consciously environmentally-minded works. At the very least, its existence within such a contemporary program exposes how prevalent and unavoidable this issue is in our present world; recognizing the eerie parallels between the decline of celluloid and the decline of the natural world, these filmmakers seem to have arrived at their finished material out of a sense of obvious ethical responsibility. The urgency shows. Only a measly portion of contemporary cinema bothers to creatively engage with the unignorable fate of our industrial over-reliance, and Balagan has managed to tactfully unify the noble few.

A Tangle of Notes, Impressions, and Questions on Hollis Frampton's Zorn's Lemma

(Note: This piece assumes that you've seen the film. If you haven't, I strongly encourage you to do so before navigating my jumbled thoughts. The film is part of The Criterion Collection's characteristically revelatory edition, "A Hollis Frampton Odyssey.")


- Opening in darkness, Hollis Frampton's Zorn's Lemma (1970) asks its viewer to clear his/her perceptual slate and approach the film with fresh eyes and ears. Then, for its ensuing hour, it asks if this is even possible.

- Pulling its title from a mathematical theory proposed by Max Zorn in 1935 concerning algebraic sets and limits and featuring readings from a primitive grammar textbook, Zorn's Lemma sets itself up against man-made systems for comprehending the world and then creates some of its own corresponding yet distinctly cinematic systems. One of these is the film's structure, divided into three sections and progressing, broadly, from darkness to light, from sound to silence to sound, from visual absence to visual assault to mechanical recording, and through various attempts at rule-bound objectivity.


- In the film's extensive, unfurling middle section, the question of intentionality vs. spontaneity is repeatedly frustrated. Frampton's self-imposed A-Z structure, for the most part, dictates itself, but there are continually slippages of rationality when it seems as if the mathematical ordering of images and words has been deliberately obstructed. Assuming the one-second shots were arranged chronologically according to the order in which Frampton filmed them, I can't help but wonder whether a sly pairing such as "limp member" might not be quite so aleatoric. And if it's indeed something Frampton slipped in deliberately, why? This middle section is a puzzle of images without a clear solution, and in such cases I get the sense that the lack of clarity is carefully modulated, that Frampton might be fudging with his own rules as a way of positing the impossibility of objectively making sense of the world.


- I interpret Zorn's Lemma as a film about the limits of constructed knowledge systems (i.e. language, symbolism, time, cinema), so in one sense my desire as a viewer is to witness Frampton crafting a set of principles that he pedantically follows, only to watch as that system naturally crumbles, forcing a secondary system to emerge. In the context of Zorn's Lemma, that first system is language, broken into letters and their accompanying words, and the secondary system is images, which begin to emerge as Frampton runs out of the filmed words he collected. One way of looking at the second part of the film is through the assumption that words are unambiguous and closed-off while images are alive to the interpretive powers of the viewer, but then there are Frampton's additional tricks that complicate this reading. First, there is the fact that the words too are images, and secondly, there is the fact that the images too are a construction of the man behind the camera, framing the world according to his existing set of principles. These paradoxes and complexities are crystallized by the seemingly arbitrarily recurring motif of optically-printed text on top of an image, a calculated effect that simultaneously makes plain and simple the word/image double standards and also seems to violate Frampton's rules.


- Meanwhile, the images themselves are complicated. They are too diverse to be pinned to a shallow, undifferentiated reading as "images," posed dialectically against "words." There are shots that are temporally-bound (a jar filling up with beans, a cropped view of hands assembling a tinker toy, a man painting a wall) and others that are infinite. The time-based shots are defined by the fact that the actions contained within them are finite; they will end, and, presumably, so will the shot. On the other hand, the ocean or a single leafless tree on a hill will continue existing indefinitely. Only the representation of it through the camera will end. Frampton is calling attention to the inherent discontinuity between material reality and the human need to compartmentalize it, to give it shape and meaning through representation. Is there any other way to interpret the special effects shots in the film (two halves of a woman's head unsettlingly misaligned or three identical figures bouncing a volleyball in the same frame) than as flagrant expressions of this urge?


- The film's final section, then, is the (attempted) inverse to this manipulation: people performing an action seemingly of their own accord (walking across a snowy field into the forest) and a static camera recording that process in three uninterrupted takes, each the length of an 100-foot 16mm roll. On the surface, the approach might seem God-like, or at least that's how I see it. These figures appear to be unaware of the camera and their resulting representation therein. However, as a cinematic spectator it's obvious that this is a constructed scenario merely aiming for the illusion of truth. In service of its reprisal of age-old debates about photographic objectivity, this section decidedly inverts Frampton's editing system in the second section; here, cuts (which resemble dissolves in this case, complete with the defects inevitably accompanying the tail end of the film roll) are dictated by the limits of the cinematographic apparatus, not any editorial consciousness. But when a sudden squall of snow fills the frame, momentarily flooding the film with natural beauty despite seeming to arrive with unnatural haste, can we still trust this to be the case, or has Frampton's (and, by extension, man's) desire for aesthetic surprise and fulfillment intruded?

-On the soundtrack, loopy words spoken by two women at the pace of a nagging metronome dissolve into sonic mush. Again, the possibility of a subjectivity (the women's voices) is raised within a rule-bound system (the metronome) and the latter overwhelms the former. The subjective is reduced by the limits within which it is contained. Zorn's Lemma demonstrates that everything inside of it is a product of human interference, and any attempt to dissect its contents can only be as rewarding as its viewer (and its viewer's accompanying systems for understanding the world) will allow it to be.

New Robert Todd Films

(Note: Many of Todd's films – including some of those discussed in this piece – are available in full or excerpted form on his treasure chest of a Vimeo profile, but I have only written about the films I saw in the theatrical setting. It goes without saying that this is the ideal venue for this kind of work.)

The otherworldly meditations on the everyday produced by Boston-based filmmaker/professor Robert Todd are some of the most underappreciated visions in contemporary experimental cinema. Living in the same niche as the much wider seen work of Nathaniel Dorsky, Todd’s films have consistently targeted an alternative way of seeing the world, privileging abstraction over concrete representation to turn mundane spaces into alien landscapes of light, color, and texture. However, despite the way his work brushes against the unknown in its willful transformation of perceived reality, it also maintains a sensuous connection to earthbound pleasures; though he’s lived and worked in a major urban center for decades – a quotidian reality that would lead another filmmaker to concoct something like Peter Hutton’s New York Portraits – his films are notable for their tranquil evocations of nature, of animals, of children playing, etc.

For the majority of his career, much of this material has been captured within and around Boston. Todd’s past year’s worth of work, however (which recently screened at the Paramount Theater), finds his camera discovering the latent alcoves of cinematic beauty in locales as diverse as Canada and Portugal. All shot on 16mm and presented silent or with ambient soundscapes, the six works presented (part of an alarmingly prolific total of 14 in 2012) expand upon Todd’s sophisticated idea of the lyrical film, not only widening the depths of mood already achieved in his oeuvre but also introducing new landscapes, textures, and perspectives.

The program opened with a somewhat comfortingly familiar slide into the Todd world: Summer Light: Tuesday, a silent, sunny ode to his Jamaica Plain residence that Todd himself described aptly as “the way my mind works.” The film is the fifth and final piece in a series of works focusing on different qualities of light in the summer, and here the focus is on even mid-afternoon rays obstructed by layers of foliage. Todd's richly textured images of plant life, unidentifiable surfaces, and the rare, fragmented hint of humanity are marked by strong contrasts between sun-bleached portions of the frame and regions shrouded in thick darkness. Long lensing renders much of the images as washes of color and light punctuated by one particularly detailed focal point, such as the skin of a leaf or the surface of a chain-link fence. The fluidity of these images in conversation with one another becomes especially impressive when taking into account that they were edited in camera on a single 100-foot roll of 16mm; analog dissolves and subtle superimpositions abound, speaking to Todd's prophetic feel for tempo, visual architecture, and exposure.

If Summer Light: Tuesday seems to exist within Todd’s artistic/mental comfort zone, the next films suggest the filmmaker attempting to chart less familiar modes of representation. Construct is shot at an emu farm in one of Todd’s favorite formats: high-contrast black-and-white stock, which casts the photographed reality under a particularly chalky chiaroscuro, rendering it strange and unearthly. The science-fiction undercurrent of Todd’s work detected by one commenter in a post-screening Q&A is a sentiment that likely arose from this film in particular. Given the way Todd’s close-ups, canted angles, and distinctive film stock transform the emus into an amorphous mass of silver fur and twig-like limbs, mistaking the film for extraterrestrial footage is not entirely out of the realm of possibility. Likewise, every earthly object has been transformed into an abstraction; a sheet blowing in the wind becomes something else entirely, and the source of one cotton-like surface dappled with light is impossible to discern. On the soundtrack are what presumably were once diegetic recordings at the farm, but they're distorted and looped beyond recognition so that what's left is a murky drone augmenting the already ominous mood developed by the imagery.

Emus return in Sunderlight, this time in color but looking no less menacing. If there's one key difference between Construct and Sunderlight besides the shift to monochrome to color, it's the overarching tone. While Construct is eerily meditative, Sunderlight is the closest thing to an imposing horror film in Todd's body of work, an impression largely aroused by a haunting, sustained ambient score of clipped diegetic noises, long bell-like tones, and ghostly, operatic vocal bits. The bizarre presence of the emus is crucial too; these slender, jittery creatures stare at several points directly into the camera, and the only thing separating them from the viewer is a measly wire fence that Todd's camera pays a great deal of attention to. It's possible to read a certain environmentalist warning into the film (could Todd be making a statement about the dangerous human habit of forcefully containing nature?), but as with all of these pieces such narrative or thematic analyses come up short. What's really achieved here is the approximation of a completely foreign perspective. Brakhage's lofty aim to use the camera as a child's eye is fully realized by Todd; Sunderlight presents an environment so profoundly fragmented that every shot feels like an unsettling discovery through some primitive consciousness.

The same impulse towards extracting a sense of uncertainty or danger out of ordinary places is inherent in Passage, though it’s re-contextualized to fit a more geographically and thematically diverse film. Erecting dichotomies such as nature vs. civilization, subjectivity vs. objectivity, and comfort vs. foreignness, Todd’s camera spans a nondescript forest, Portuguese ruins, and tall, mathematically ordered buildings to present a meditation on visual forms that echo across organic and man-made phenomena. As is often the case, Todd uses an aesthetic framework to link his images together; in this case, it’s the visual incorporation of dark doors and windows framing the world beyond it, implemented as portals to the various locations in which he films (the idea of passageways, both organic and synthetic, was established by Todd with his 2011 film Portcullis). Within this framework, nature possesses a serene quality (typical in Todd’s work and another of several things that aligns him with Brakhage) while buildings and foreign landscapes are to be regarded with additional caution and consideration.

Mosaic de Porto continues the arms-length fascination with Portugal introduced by Passage. In both films, footage taken in the country is clearer, crisper, and more evenly lit than the type of amorphous, intimate imagery in Todd's domestic work, but despite that superficial clarity the Portuguese material feels distant and unknown, the activities captured capable of overwhelming Todd's usual command of the frame. Mosaic de Porto offers a flurry of afternoon impressions in a well-populated area, shifting from a significant human element (children running around in grassy fields and families gathered for picnics) to images of the landscape and architectural creations. Rather than bending the physical world to his own painterly aspirations, Todd's presence is closer to that of a fly on the wall, collecting bits and pieces of what's happening around him, attempting to adhere to his impulse towards contemplative abstraction but consistently being thwarted by the level of exuberance and newness in his vicinity. As such, in spite of its brevity Mosaic de Porto nonetheless bursts with life, showcasing a looser but no less potent side of Todd's artistic sensibility.

The evening concluded with one of Todd’s throwaway joke films – a mash-up of close-ups of Elijah Wood from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy that’s allegedly a homage/update to Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc – but even this seemingly tossed-off experiment is in line with Todd’s sensibility, sharing parallels with his lyrical work in the way it takes a familiar object (a daily environment, a pop culture item) and distorts it to create an unfamiliar space of contemplation. By isolating the emphatically emotional close-ups of Wood, the actor's face becomes a landscape of reflection, simultaneously encouraging and frustrating a narrative reading. Todd, noticing certain patterns within Wood's expressions that fall loosely into the categories of wonder and intense agony, slowly sculpts the arrangement of the shots to extract a bizarre maternal narrative in which the smiley Wood seems to birth a devilish doppelgänger who is repulsed by his creator. There were plenty of laughs scattered throughout the theater during this clever repurposing act, but they were balanced by the sense that Todd’s aims were just as eye-opening and worthwhile as in his more decidedly serious work. In the process of watching these films, one witnesses the physical world radically re-imagined in a way that that unveils the beauty, complexity, and strangeness previously hidden in plain sight.

AFI Fest 2012: Saturday Nov. 3rd and Sunday Nov. 4th

(Disclaimer: These notes were scribbled in between screenings while waiting in line for other films. Only minor editing, for grammatical and factual purposes, occurred.) Thank God for the AFI Fest. I mean it as no overstatement to say that I was positively ecstatic to discover that the festival would be running during my stay in Los Angeles and that it was, without trickery or fine print, completely free. Here was an opportunity to check off the year's most anticipated festival films from Toronto, Venice, and New York, as well as the films I missed at Cannes, in one fell swoop. For perhaps the first time ever, I will have surveyed a year in film adequately enough to put forth a confident year-end list. I was quick to find out, however, that AFI Fest is not entirely different from Cannes – that is, not the silver platter I was unrealistically hoping for: films reach capacity abruptly, the packed schedule makes the head spin, and, most irritatingly, it’s still quite possible to wait in line for over an hour and, after standing awkwardly with confused victims as the time slot passes, be denied entry to a film. This was my start to the festival. Fortunately, it was a Kim Ki-Duk film, and I was already half-planning my first paragraph (the festival got off to a deeply unpleasant start with Pieta, because what else is new with KKK?...).

My schedule did finally begin with a bang, however, on Saturday afternoon with Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio, the British director’s gorgeously shot and cut second feature about a meek English sound engineer named Gilderoy (Toby Jones) who arrives in Italy (in Rohmer-esque elliptical fashion, right at the beginning of the film) as a for-hire mixer on fictional director Giancarlo Santini’s (Antonio Mancino) giallo horror film, very much in the vain of Argento, Bava, etc. He’s expecting an inoffensive paid gig, but quickly discovers the work will be neither easy (he’s never worked on such a challenging or morally trying project) nor profitable (“money cannot be a motivator,” warns the absurdly dominating Santini). From there, Gilderoy phones in his work, begs for travel reimbursement, confesses to artistic differences, attempts to abandon the job only to be ominously turned down, and finally enters that familiar Lynchian zone of mushy disorientation where art, illusion, and reality clash and ultimately absorb one another (in this regard, Strickland's corresponding blending of image and sound through fluid transitions is accomplished).

The film hinges on a swap in female leads – a maneuver so often employed or hinted at by Lynch as a paradigm shift – and this gesture holds the key to understanding what Strickland is getting at. Berberian Sound Studio manages to be both a parodic celebration of the endless innovation and almost goofy conviction of Italian horror as well as a critical commentary on not only this particular genre but all works of art and cinema that, in aiming for so-called “brutal honesty,” end up merely perpetuating dominant and wrongheaded attitudes. Here, the target is misogyny, so carelessly flaunted in Santini’s dictatorial and borderline abusive direction, which eventually flurries into actual (offscreen) sexual offense. Gilderoy, an unwitting third-party, is finally affected by this workplace atmosphere too: after the actress switch, he begins speaking in Italian and his gestures grow remote and mechanical, the implication being that, in being swallowed up by this project, his identity has shifted, just as any artistic act must require complete commitment and immersion – one might say, the abandonment of one’s self – for it to work. Money cannot be a motivator, indeed.



In the next film I saw, very little could be boiled down to motivation. Nony Geffen’s microbudget feature Not in Tel Aviv seems to delight in its own senselessness, putting across radical tonal shifts and pieces of nonsensical dialogue with an unshakeable straight face. One might say this is a nihilistic film, but that would be disingenuous. Geffen has too much apparent joy for life and too much compassion for his wayward leads, even as he writes them into increasingly implausible scenarios. Essentially a series of non-sequiturs shared between an antisocial teacher (played by Geffen himself), his kidnapped student, and his high school sweetheart, the film has the dazed aimlessness of an Andrew Bujalski movie shot with an additional jolt of sensuality. Early on, I was bothered and even slightly put off by its incongruent approach – Geffen plays the murder of a mother as indie quirk – but slowly I found myself catching on to the film’s rarefied wavelength, and its misty light and soft pixilated black-and-white edges had a lot to do with it. Geffen’s photographic attention to his beautiful lead actresses (Romi Aboulafia and Yaara Pelzig are real finds) is near-Bergmanesque, allowing the film a genuine tenderness not often present in this kind of quasi-mumblecore exercise.

Unfortunately, the questions that were bouncing around in my head after the intoxicatingly weird Not in Tel Aviv – were the actresses actual friends of Geffen?; were the events depicted autobiographical?; to be blunt, what were the intentions? – would not be appeased as I had to ditch the Q&A to scurry a block down the street to catch Holy Motors again. Leos Carax’s hypnotic poem was resoundingly my favorite work from Cannes this summer, and I was hoping to relive some of the mystified joy I experienced watching it for the first time. Turns out that in many ways Holy Motors, by its very loony episodic nature, is designed to have a special effect on the virginal and the uninitiated (this chatty American crowd was having more of a ball with it than the French). That is not to say that I was not still deeply immersed in this dreamlike cocoon of a film, but that I lost a great deal of the shock and awe that accompanied my first viewing. In its place, though, came even greater contemplation, as Carax’s layers of association and abstraction only invite further peeling back. When I first saw the film in Cannes, I had to rush out before the credits rolled to stand in line for Amour, but this time I was able to sit through and caught Carax's dedication to the late Yekaterina Golubeva, the star of Pola X and the mother of the director's child. Knowing this placed in context the film's mournful attitude towards role-playing and the inevitability of life, and rendered Carax's self-aware sense of humor a particular bright spot.



It’s impossible to dismiss the technical difficulties that set the scheduled start time of the film back an hour and a half. When the film did begin, it was clear that the issues had still not been entirely resolved: in the moody, suggestive opening of Carax himself surveying his bedroom and then opening a hidden door to reveal a sleeping crowd at a cinema, the projectionists were still fiddling quite conspicuously with brightness and contrast, causing some images to blotch up indecipherably. When Carax finally cuts to daylight, an unflattering fog of green and a blowing out of the highlights was overwhelming for the first 10 minutes until finally the projectionists cleared up the matter. Oddly enough, this unpredictable happenstance helped bolster Holy Motors’ argument for celluloid; even though it’s shot in digital, it’s constantly calling attention to and mourning the intangible instability of its medium, the unsettling question of what exactly it means to be a digital recording in the first place as opposed to a concrete film strip. In fact, the film even offers some digital distortions of its own towards the end, as traveling views of nocturnal Paris crumble into incomprehensible fuzz and glitch. These shots are not unlike the unplanned problems at the beginning of the film (I’m sure some unknowing viewers suspected these were reprisals of the projection difficulties, or, conversely, that the issues at the beginning were intentional), and they contribute to the overwhelming feelings of sadness and loss that permeate the film – towards decay, larger purpose, and past selves.

Next up was Olivier Assayas' Something in the Air (French title: Après mai) the following afternoon, a coming-of-age drama set amidst the political turbulence of early 70s France when young, angry, and overeducated leftists were lashing out at a reactionary government stubbornly stuck in its ways after the May 1968 protests. For the most part, the film doesn't emphasize the detail of the political situation, instead allowing its explosive opening riot scene – wherein some of Assayas' most impressive and fluid visual choreography, feeling both hectic and precise, traces the beatings and chases through a thick fog of tear gas – to form the unsettling groundwork for the protagonists' bitterness throughout the film. Further acts of violence and vandalism ensue: Gilles (Clément Métayer), Christine (Lola Créton, gradually becoming the new Anna Karina in her puckish expressions, on-and-off sass, and unshowy ease), and Alain (Felix Armand) seem determined to see how hard they can push the buttons of their school officials before being expelled or arrested, and when they appear to have reached that breaking point after hurling a flaming bottle at a portable on school grounds, they decide to flee to Italy for a short time. This is precisely when the film reaches its peak (I could swoon in those picturesque shots of Italy much longer), and what follows descends slightly down a familiar path of free spirits, Pollock-inspired paintings, activist folk, agitprop filmmaking, hard drugs, and foggy religious epiphanies.



That Something in the Air ultimately coalesces into very little (or perhaps just something more elusive that I didn't catch on first viewing) after promising so much is disappointing given Assayas' track record of making seemingly simple films that expand outward to account for multiple layers of emotion and subtext. The film continues the fleet-footed cool and bright pastel ambiance of Summer Hours (both of which were lensed by Eric Gautier, a disciple of the late Harris Savides in his naturalistic lighting and confident camerawork) but lacks something as revelatory as that film's wise commentary on the value inscribed in objects or the irreconcilable divides between generations. It's expertly scored with period-specific rock and folk tunes, as always with Assayas, and there is also his characteristically rapt attention to tactility and sensations – to the feeling of breezy currents in open air rooms, of cigarette smoke wafting through fiery debates, and of thin surfaces of summer sweat lining the skin – but as I left the theater, I could not escape the feeling that Something in the Air was missing a sense of a larger purpose or a core idea other than nimbly handled nostalgia.

The next film more than made up for any disconnect I felt in the latter stages of Assayas' movie. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan, in its perfect (terribly, terribly perfect) harmony of form and function, elicited the most physical response I've had to a film since either Antichrist or Irreversible. At a certain point towards the hour-mark of the film, I regrettably had to step out just to regain my gravitational bearings and walk off a growing nausea that was threatening to act up (if you catch my drift). Plunging the viewer into the nightmarish labor of deep sea commercial fishing via an onslaught of abstract imagery captured with an array of Go Pro cameras hooked to various parts of the sea vessel (chains, anchors, workers' helmets, even maimed fish), the film achieves a profound groundlessness that is the very poison of anyone prone to seasickness. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor's visuals have a lo-res harshness that occasionally bleeds into downright abstraction as it is, and when they couple that with an adventurous editing style that cuts invisibly from darkness to darkness so that one moment the camera is being pummeled underwater by the wake of the ship and the next it's staring into the gaping mouth of a bloody fish on deck, there's no ground zero to grasp on to. It's a hallucinatory succession of sensual image and sound, making the rare moments when the camera settles itself briefly (as in an amusing long take of a fishermen falling asleep to drab television on his break) a much needed repose.



Whatever my own personal physical objections to Leviathan, I cannot deny the groundbreaking accomplishment that it is. This is authorless, distinctly 21st century cinema; or rather, I should say that its author is the ocean, the wind, the fish and the seagulls aboard the ship – that is, all elements untouched by the human hand, but only made visible through technological advances in image capture. (To go a step further, the fact that some of the film's moments end up feeling so aesthetically sublime, such as when flocks of angelic seagulls seem to be flying in mystical awareness of the camera, implies that nature itself has an artful side.) The result is something vaguely akin to David Gatten's aleatoric scratch film series What the Water Said, but whereas Gatten's work points backwards and sideways to Brakhage, Thorston Fleisch, and Bruce McClure even as it paves new roads, Leviathan is even more unmatched in the history of seeing, even more progressive in its optimism for the limitless possibilities of the medium. It was fitting, then, that for some unknown reason the couple seated behind me brought their very young daughter to the screening. Her whispery pronouncements of awe ("look, the fish!", "where are we?", etc.), particularly impassioned during the short about herding in the northern hemisphere that preceded Leviathan (called Reindeer and directed by Eva Weber, who has a hell of an eye and whose future work I look forward to), put into further perspective the mysterious blank slate vision of this film.

(Note: My next screenings are tonight and Wednesday, not to mention any surprises I might throw in between, so expect a Part Two by Thursday.)

A Performance by Bruce McClure on April 10, 2012

The projector performances of Bruce McClure have ever so gradually spawned a cultish reputation in avant-garde circles, their intense and in-your-face qualities demanding the attention of adventurous filmgoers. Perhaps the major reason why McClure has not quite become a leading fixture with this niche audience though is the fact that his work is fundamentally ephemeral. Limited to late-evening spectacles shown once and never repeated in quite the same manner, his improvisational audiovisual experiences defy the act of preservation in any form, and, given their intermittent strobing effects, any attempt at digital capture is destined to either fail or inadequately represent the woozy ambiance the performances impart on their audiences. The thrill of McClure's work comes precisely from its existence in a dark room amongst various bemused, hypnotized, and enraged viewers, as well as from the sense of it having no pre-destined plan other than what McClure happens to concoct for you in the center of the room.

McClure was at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 10th, a quaint old arthouse that is probably not the ideal venue for his setup: two studio speakers (meant to belt out pummeling industrial soundscapes), a fairly puny six-by-eight projector screen propped up invasively in front of the much larger house screen behind it, and a table strewn awkwardly atop theater seats in the middle of the room upon which two projectors, a tangle of XLR cables, and an assembly line of guitar delay pedals. It's an arrangement that looks gentle and friendly at first, as if for a home movie gathering; that is, before McClure starts building towards a feverish strobing of light and an aggressive layering of harsh, dense electronic tones. At the peak of the mesmerizing chaos, it's easy to wonder how such a forceful sensory overload can emanate from such a delicate-looking apparatus. Part of McClure's ongoing reputation is to go against the grain of every venue he enters, be it movie theater, studio, or museum; pretty much no space can contain the shuttering racket he creates.

The show began with flashes of amorphous shapes against black leader as a dry, harsh crackle resembling the sound of dribbled basketballs bit-crushed and thrown through distortion poked hesitantly through the silence of the room. At this point, the house lights were still on, but when McClure started to apply reverb and looping effects to his crunchy soundtrack, the theater slowly went dark. It's the first gesture that aligns McClure with the structuralists, a way of staging the theater space itself as the inside of a camera. Suddenly, the room is dark and the screen is the world beyond the shutter hole, flickering with light and imperceptible forms. Together, the visuals and the audio stray from any semblance of shape and definition, until the screen is a mere blob of featureless light strobing in and out and the speakers deliver an enveloping drone. McClure riffed on this blueprint for about an hour once it developed, subtly altering the image and soundtrack throughout with his pedal system. Sometimes, the brightest point of the screen was blinding, other times very faint. Similarly, the sound ranged from blistering and high-pitched to strangely lulling. Between the two, the audio is more active, contrasting with the blankness of the image.

A curious dialogue between sound and image developed during McClure's performance. Menacing patterns in the soundtrack appeared to tease out ghostly images in the void of the screen, while persistent attention to the strobing produced a euphoria that caused potentially non-existent sounds to surface in the mix. The result of this fascinating interplay is that no viewer experiences McClure's work in quite the same way; one may interpret his performances as abrasive and violent while others may feel soothed by the experience. I found myself vacillating between these two poles, discovering organic forms in the chaos of the screen at some points and feeling pummeled by the loudness other times. For all the seeming redundancy of the performance, McClure does manage to conjure up a surprising variety of emotional responses.

David Gatten's Secret History of the Dividing Line

In a cinematic culture where words, whether onscreen or via narration, are commonly ghettoized as paltry emotional shorthand and "visual storytelling" is trumpeted as the pinnacle of the art form, David Gatten's films present an urgent retort. Having relished, dissected, and contemplated the printed word for almost twenty years now - and he plans to continue to do so for the rest of his career - Gatten has rediscovered the mysterious allure of typographic language in a specifically temporal context distinct from literature. The crux of this fascination is Secret History of the Dividing: A True Account in Nine Parts, a series of films initiated by Gatten in 1999 and prospectively set to conclude in 2028. Thus far, four films, all silent and black-and-white and ranging from 18 to 37 minutes, have been completed: Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, or The Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Art of Printing, The Enjoyment of Reading, Secret History of the Dividing Line, and The Great Art of Knowing. Together these films represent an astonishing, mysterious body of work with a distinctive approach to visual grammar, a shifting set of complex themes, and a loose, fragmentary narrative.

The inspiration for Gatten's series is a mesmerizing melodrama circling around the history of the settling of the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina in the early days of Colonial North America. William Byrd II, a government official from Virginia, is the focus of Gatten's historical curiosity. In a forgotten fragment of history, Byrd was one of the pivotal journeymen responsible for finalizing the colonial border, and subsequently wrote two volumes about the experience (one titled The History of the Dividing Line and another more suggestively deemed Secret History of the Line). These two pieces of literature were the seeds of an entire library established by Byrd of writings on the social, economic, and political landscape of 18th century America. However, this sizable repository of personalized knowledge, considered by Gatten to be in many ways the inauguration of American intellectual identity, was gradually eclipsed by a generation of more conventional libraries and has become, like its founder, a mere blip in the timeline of history.



Taking the lead of the supposed "secret history" that Byrd penned which was swiftly obfuscated, Gatten similarly mines the non-sequiturs, loose ends, and unglamorous areas of history. What results is a sprawling interrogation of the notion of historical accuracy, raising the question of what gets into history books to be taught to new generations and why. Part 1 of the series, Secret History of the Dividing Line (2002) - which was actually the third film released, adhering to Gatten's strange, achronological ordering - wastes no time elucidating these themes, opening with a single jagged scratch running frantically through the center of the frame as various dates flash by beside it. It's immediately clear that the scratch represents the border drawn between Virginia and North Carolina, but it becomes several other things in the process: a wavering timeline, a manifestation of the divide between what we know and what we can't know, between reality and fiction, and between life and death. The thematic import of this line weighs on the rest of the series, as Gatten is not so much nodding to the tidiness of the line as he is questioning how accurate it can be when dealing with the mysteries of time and existence. A subplot in Byrd's story is a spooky tale of William's daughter Evelyn, a woman with romantic hardships that plagued the final years of her life, and whose ghost has allegedly been spotted several times roaming around the state border. Gatten wonders whether a narrative such as this, seemingly only the stuff of folk tale, is any less vital, any less instrumental in the progress of history than, say, the writing of the Declaration of Independence.

The onscreen time allotted to each historical date running along the timeline of the scratch varies drastically. Some dates run only a few frames, appearing as indecipherable flashes of text that mirror the relative insignificance of single moments in such a vast stretch of time. Others, such as the date of the inauguration of Spiritualism in the Americas, or the birth of William Byrd II, show up legibly for a few seconds. Gatten is foregrounding those seemingly trivial aspects of history that are of importance to his project, and neglecting some of the more universally talked-about and written-about cornerstones of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. In doing so, he provides subtle hints towards the thematic and narrative preoccupations that the series continues to explore in fragments. That these are merely hints and not full aesthetic discourses seems essential to Gatten, because the Secret History of the Dividing Line series traces the way a narrative and a work of art is pieced together over time, just as the ideas and stories being explored were nurtured throughout the course of decades and centuries. Further issuing this point, Secret History of the Dividing Line, the film, follows this opening timeline sequence with an extended progression of images of amorphous, gravelly textures, chiaroscuro concoctions smearing half the screen and evoking a primordial soup. It's a gesture that bluntly denies any further intellectual engagement, insisting upon a sensual relationship to the celluloid instead.



The Great Art of Knowing (2004), Gatten's second and most poetic film in the series, extends upon the project's relationship to the act of searching through history and excavating details. Here, Gatten's camera scours a library, revealing old, dusty books illuminated only by a tickle of sunshine sneaking through trees outside. Not only do these luscious close-ups revel in the ancient artifacts of preserved but ultimately defunct knowledge, they also savor the very idea of material aging, bringing dust, wrinkled paper, and archaic cursive writing into detailed view. One can practically smell the organic odor emanating from the old paper. These shots are all about the beauty of the handiwork involved in printing these books, and equally about a lament for the decline of the library or the archive and the loss of printed literature as a primary mode of research. To contrast the printed word, Gatten also reveals excerpts from some of Byrd's writings in onscreen text, begging the same question Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy raised so eloquently last year: is a copy of an original inherently any less authentic or moving?

Gatten juxtaposes his library imagery with the occasional burst of abstraction, like a wispy shot of refracted light or a microscopic view of shrubbery, all of which establishes the undercurrent of micro vs. macro running through the film and more gently through the entire series. The Great Art of Knowing explores both minutiae - the relaxed daily schedule jotted down by Byrd in his journals, the texture of old books, the play of natural light on objects - and grand imagery, such as a black-and-white lithograph of a Renaissance-era creation painting, or a glimpse of Byrd's full name and government rank etched majestically beneath a dramatic logo. The film is posing the comparatively mundane next to the decidedly iconic and searching for the dissonances, or lack thereof, between the two. One can also sense Gatten's interest in spirituality growing in stature; throughout the series, myth, religion, and ghost stories show up offhandedly as ways of glimpsing into the past with greater clarity, or, perhaps for Byrd, living life to the fullest. Philosophical concepts appear as jumping off points for examining and sifting through the vast landscape of history.



The first two films produced in the series - technically part three and four in Gatten's order - are Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Art of Printing (1999) and The Enjoyment of Reading (2001). The former takes its name from writer Joseph Moxon's 18th century volume on the use of the newly invented printing press, which initiated a widespread proliferation of knowledge that was hitherto unheard of. It's fitting that Gatten would have started production of the series with this film, because like Moxon, it marks an attempt to assess and comment upon the current function and significance of written knowledge. Naturally, the film, as well as its follow-up, is filled with optically printed text, almost at the neglect of any conventionally filmed images, but the ways in which Gatten uses text become intensely and distinctly cinematic. In The Enjoyment of Reading, letters, enlarged and small, zip by on the screen in all different directions (Gatten rarely adheres to left-to-right movement, the standard method of visually depicting historical progress), transforming into pure abstraction. It's simultaneously a clever joke on the title (none of the text is actually legible), a representation of the chaotic progress of many different types of knowledge across history, and a gentle critique of the modern propensity towards speed, which so often reduces disciplined written work to mere visual noise. In Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Art of Printing, sentences appear on screen slowly and legibly, but their meanings are obscured by nonsensical grammar, forcing the audience to admire the texture of the printed word instead.

This dynamic between admiration of the printing process and argument for the necessity of reading is only one of the many balancing acts on display in Secret History of the Dividing Line, which also negotiates the tricky terrain between progress and stasis, preservation and obsolescence, fiction and non-fiction, cinema and some kind of post-cinema, and life and death. Gatten has embarked upon a body of work that is perpetually shifting and expanding upon its core ideas, and that utilizes a narrative backbone that is broad and intriguing enough to warrant continued attention. Given the web of ideas, methods, and characters Gatten has yet to explore, there is practically a guarantee that future works will avoid redundancy. With its overwhelming accumulation of details and symmetries, the series requires and rewards the kind of devoted, solitary attention with which it was lovingly created.