Memorable images, moments, qualities, techniques and scenes from the 2021 edition of North America’s oldest avant-garde and experimental film festival
Kim Gordon: Earthquake (Loretta Fahrenholz, TRLLM (Jak Ritger, K8 Howl), 2020)
When Daniel Kasman covered the Locarno Festival on Notebook in 2017 he hit upon a great way of engaging with standout work. In his introduction, he explained that he would be “looking for specific images, moments, techniques, qualities or scenes…that grabbed me and have lingered past and beyond the next movie seen, whose characters, story and images have already begun to overwrite those that came just before.” This seemed like a great way to engage with the creative work in a milieu like a festival - to concentrate on that which lingers rather than attempting to highlight everything. As such, we’ve shamelessly pilfered this very technique for the ALT/KINO festival reports.
In this instance, Ben Nicholson went in search of memorable techniques, images, and effects in amongst the vast range of short experimental work screening in competition at Ann Arbor’s online 2021 edition.
13 (Shinya Isobe, 2020)
The earthbound periphery elevating the celestial in Shinya Isobe’s 13
Anything earthbound might seem a counterintuitive focal point in Shinya Isobe’s graceful solar-gazing experience but in the mundanity of the everyday, his heavenly imagery becomes increasingly majestic. Created over five years with interval shooting and multiple exposures, Isobe describes 13, in which multiple suns repeatedly move across the sky in dazzling formation, as a creative act of image-making and an authentic record. Falling into this second category are marginal elements like the intermittent hum of clinking glasses and conversation on the soundtrack and, eventually, the silhouetted roofs of surrounding buildings. Far from diminishing the impact of the celestial spectacle, these terrestrial encroachments on the visuals and soundscape seem to boldly frame the main event. Isobe’s portrait(s) of the sun(s) setting is quite emotionally powerful in and of itself, but this anchoring of it in our own sky seems to amplify its magnificence.
Another Horizon (Stephanie M. Barber, 2020)
Joining and dividing lines in Stephanie M. Barber’s Another Horizon
Stephanie M. Barber’s Another Horizon, as might be gleaned from its title, is interested in borders. The title refers to the line that delineates the division between earth and sky and the place where they both meet. As Barber’s camera pans from left to right across an ever-scrolling collage of adjoined photographic settings, a jagged white line traces the outline of the landscape, crossing the vertical border between different images to wend its way over multiple vistas. While this happens, two different voices muse upon the nature of the horizon, offering physical and metaphysical observations that blur the distinction between the two and probe at the implications of crossing such a divide. All the while the white line traces across the screen, scratching a route along the landscape, and mimicking a soundwave as if to append the separate conversations into a single continuous flow. Suddenly the divisions between the combined images and sounds become as theoretical as the horizon itself.
Beyond Noh (Patrick Smith, 2020)
Facial recognition in Patrick Smith’s Beyond Noh
Patrick Smith’s whistle-stop tour through nearly 3,500 masks from around the globe in under four minutes manages to be interesting on a number of levels despite its brevity and apparent simplicity. It is memorable both for its relation to cinema’s central tenet, the animation of the inanimate; it is interesting in the breadth of its social and political ramifications, but it is the film’s presentation of pattern recognition that lodges it in the mind. In a similar way to the 2019 short Adversarial Feeling made by the artificial intelligence Lorem (and artist Francesco D’Abbraccio), Beyond Noh seems to forge almost seamless connections between disparate images of masks, morphing approximate stylised faces into one another. The centred and rigid placing of the masks in the frame makes these transitions less visually mind-bending than Lorem’s more fluid transitions, but as the accompanying drumbeat gets faster and the images blur together, the juxtaposition of their morphing uniformity and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it variety becomes the film’s most striking aspect.
I Dream of Emma and Tony (Natalia Rocafuerte, 2020)
Media dreamscapes in Natalia Rocafuerte’s I Dream of Emma and Tony
Dreams can be surreal enough on their own, but in Natalia Rocafuerte’s absorbing I Dream of Emma and Tony, the strangeness of a familiar ‘dreamy’ quality is amplified by the work’s multimedia aesthetic. The film is like a supposition of what happens when the experiences that our subconscious is trying to parse during REM sleep are mediated heavily by television and the internet. Quite besides this manifesting in the appearance in the dream of someone the filmmaker doesn’t know but follows on Snapchat, the very nature of the images is born of myriad digital and technological filters. The volume of different forms vying for time - from home movies to internet memes to found footage – is one element, as is the collision of these forms within the frame often overlaid, filtered, or bleeding into one another like an imperfect background on a now-ubiquitous video call. It’s the media-saturated subconscious writ large, with ticker-tape at the bottom of your life’s feed broadcasting the latest headlines.
The Last Name of John Cage (Margaux Guillemard, 2020)
Absence in Margaux Guillemard’s The Last Name of John Cage
The isolating impact of the pandemic has understandably been the inspiration for a large number of films in the past year, but Margaux Guillemard’s The Last Name of John Cage is arguably the most interesting and gut-wrenching film to come out of the world’s various lockdowns. Guillemard takes as her inspiration Cage’s 4’33”, the famous 1952 composition in which no instruments are played, and incidental environmental noise provides the music. Where Cage was experimenting with the absence of music, the film navigates through various types of absence. A disembodied voice provides an intimate, confessional narration. She speaks about the absence of normal life and a subsequent, unintentional absence of physical intimacy. Guillemard’s film examines the way our brains react to being physically trapped, how they fill the silent void when the music of the world stops, and the deeply personal, deeply affecting ramifications of the re-surfacing of past trauma amidst the absence of incidental environmental noise.
Psychic Meat (Stephen Wardell, 2020)
Dry-cured celluloid in Stephen Wardell’s Psychic Meat
In his short, Psychic Meat, Stephen Wardell laments the inability of the processing to which he subjected the celluloid in making his film to convey the depths of his emotion. In fact, the effect is quite powerful. The film is a diary and act of bearing witness in which Wardell tells of his father’s artificial heart valve, the industrial farming industry that both provided the tissue for it and arguably hastened its necessity, and their somewhat distant father-son relationship. Wardell hand-developed this film in salt which resulted in a shimmering pock-marked effect on the celluloid which emphasises the film’s own materiality and physical precarity in line with the earthbound fleshiness of the maker’s voiceover narrative. However, the salt’s implications as a curing agent for meat and the way its visual impact brings together threads of preservation – of his father’s life, of their mutual love, of the detachment they have felt for years – and the latent imagery of these things hanging and curing over time, becomes quietly overwhelming.
Valpi (Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie, 2019)
The sliding tectonic plates of Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie’s Valpi
In a similar vein to their previous film, China Not China, Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie’s Valpi takes a formal approach to conjuring the essence of a place. The Chilean city of Valparaiso sits on the edge of the South American continent, in a position that places it in perilous proximity to a boundary between tectonic plates. In the film, the image is sliced horizontally into a dozen or so strips which pan and move at different times, creating the effect of buildings, roads, cars, and people sliding, layer by layer, across the screen. The distinction between these strips is emphasized by the Pulfrich effect (achieved by crookedly wearing sunglasses over just one eye) which creates a stereoscopic illusion, so the layers seem to slide towards or away from you. The consequence is an experience of a place that is once immersive and engulfing but also destabilising and abstracted. Typical street sounds feel like our memory filling in the gaps of a city we can’t quite recall.
Venus Rising (Colleen Keough, 2020)
The transcendental reverberations of Colleen Keough’s Venus Rising
The echoing choral voices that accompany the immaculate opening two minutes of Colleen Keough’s Venus Rising are beautiful, but perhaps feel familiar in the way that sound and song are operating to evoke historical mystique. When the song develops into a repeated reverberating chant that you can feel in your stomach just as the images are transformed into a phantasmagorical depiction of distorted land and seascapes, the effect is transcendental. Rippling markings materialising in the noise of the image appear to be shivering to the film’s acoustic timbre. The screen’s immersion in a roiling polychrome ocean becomes less an exercise in image manipulation than a privileged glimpse beyond the limits of human perception (or perhaps, patriarchal perception!). This is partly due to the transformations of the image but is enormously enhanced by the cumulative effect of the sound which seems to bodily lift the viewer out of the seat, as if in the presence of the eponymous goddess.
The 59th Ann Arbor Film Festival ran from 23 - 28 March 2021
Ben Nicholson is a writer and curator specialising in non-fiction, experimental film, and artists’ moving image. He is the founder and editor/curator of ALT/KINO.