Prismatic Ground 2024 Preview
The fourth edition of Prismatic Ground begins tomorrow (May 8) and continues through Sunday, at a variety of venues in NYC and online. I haven’t seen all of the films, of course, and will see more this weekend, so this isn’t a “best of fest” list, just some notes and recommendations on my favorites from I’ve seen previously. In addition to what’s in the list below, note the Thursday night programs with an arc screening/performance and a new four channel work by Sky Hopinka with a reading by the artist, a newly restored Raul Ruiz film, Tsai’s latest walking monk film, Isiah Medina’s He Thought He Died (one of my favorite experimental films from last year), and the Friday night program with three new Rhayne Vermette 16mm prints among other works on celluloid.
A couple of these notes are republished from my writing on other festivals.
Antoinetta Angelidi
Maybe the most exciting thing in this whole program is a major retrospective of the films of Angelidi, including what I think are US premieres of a few of the works. Some of these have been available in low quality digital rips, some not at all, but all of them are remarkable films that are due to be counted among the major works of the European modernist avant garde. We’ll be publishing a lengthy interview with Angelidi and further writing on these films in Tone Glow, but suffice it to say the restoration and screening of these films is one of the major cinema events of the year and everyone should catch them if you have the chance. In particular, note that Topos and Thief or Reality are screening in 35mm.
Aldo Tambellini
The other retrospective in the program is of pioneering video and kinescope artist Aldo Tambellini. His work in the mid to late 60s ranges from abstract multimedia experiments like Black Out, which recalls both contemporary experimental animators and the cameraless works of Brakhage, to Black TV, which employs some of the same formal devices but in a sharply political examination of television programming and the racist violence of the American psyche. Think Bruce Conner’s Report or Arthur Lipsett meets Nam June Paik and Len Lye. But none of these references are adequate, and Tambellini should be known as a major artist in his own right. Noteworthy in this program is the newly rediscovered Black Video 3, which I haven’t had a chance to see.
Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena: #59 (Joost Rekveld)
At their best, Joost Rekveld’s films have felt like glimpses into secret patterns that underlie our physical reality. His highly conceptual works are usually based in some sort of abstraction—an equation or pattern or application of chaos theory—which is then used to to generate slowly evolving visual elements. Cousins to the tradition of visual music and to contemporary artists like Takashi Makino, they often look something like a crystal formation or a media player visualizer, except that in previous works sound has been background element accompanying the images.
Rekveld’s latest, Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena, is a huge conceptual leap forward that retains the beauty of his visual patterns while deeply interrogating their seeming abstraction. After a prologue detailing key discoveries that led to chaos theory, the bulk of the film uses sound—including music, field recordings, and found sound from mid-century sci fi B movies—to create a web of meaning nearly as intricate as the geometric patterns on screen.
Technology and scientific theory are placed in historical and political context, shown as inseparable from these forces that structure human perception and use of them. The film investigates the military origin of many computer technologies, uses film dialogue about aliens and cyborgs to emphasize the specificity of human experience, and plays with the narratives we project onto abstraction through the use of field recordings. Mechanisms feels like the culmination of ideas Rekveld has been hinting at for a long time and has finally realized in a major work.
Amma Ki Katha (Nehal Vyas)
A gorgeous film built on the contrast between mythological representations of ideas of national character and origin with the much harsher present day reality. It seemlessly incorporates a pretty remarkable variety of media—music, cut out animation, archival images, original 16mm footage, theatrical performance, chemical processing—into a unified aesthetic vision. I think this is my favorite thing I’ve seen from this program from an artist I didn’t previously know.
In the Fishtank (Linnea Nugent)
Linnea Nugent seems to ave really hit her stride the last couple of years, crafting consistently memorable miniatures at the boundary of embodied subjectivity and larger conceptions of the natural world. Her new triptych In the Fishtank might be her most condensed and impactful set of images to date. The first image is a fairly static black and white shot of a tree which seems to be frozen in ashen time. The second is a white horse in a bright green field that flickers in and out of shadow. The last and briefest is a glowing red forest scene barely visible between blurred focus and an enveloping darkness that could be blinking eyelids. All three sections carry a distinctly luminescent visual character alongside the threat of its extinction through darkness. It’s otherworldly yet human, and suggests the specificity and irreducibility of our experience of nature.
UNDR (Kamal Aljafari)
The tragic history of the Nakba, the Israeli occupation, and the resulting diaspora have led to a distinctive voice among Palestinian experimental filmmakers. A recent generation of artists like Basma Alsharif, Rosalind Nashashibi, and Razan AlSalah have made films that use tools from animation and Google maps to elusive metaphors and genre film to express the violence of displacement and the longing for a stolen homeland.
The films of Kamal Aljafari work in this mode, seeking poetically indirect means to express the inexpressible: the ruin of one’s home, a people who exist outside of place and time, the thousand daily incursions by which life has been stolen from Palestine. His latest, UNDR, is constructed largely from wide shots of the landscape, mostly archival material. The camera pans the landscape from a helicopter or tripod and observes controlled demolition. The footage is transparently a hodgepodge cobbled from a variety of sources. Much of it features rocks, ruins, and holes or caverns in the cliffs.
Interspersed throughout are brief shots of farmers at work and of kids playing hide and seek. A girl’s voice can be heard against the empty, rugged hills as she counts to 100; a woman hums idly as she works. Beginning from a perspective of calculated distance and austerity, the film becomes heartbreaking precisely in its impersonality as it circles around its themes. The obscured traces of human presence, hidden by montage or the nature of a kids’ game, take on terrible gravitas as they contrast with dozens of explosions that tear apart and reshape the land. The dominant overhead perspective is a constant reminder of the state of surveillance and control of the Palestinians who remain on their land, a living contradiction for an occupying power that seeks to erase a people not just from their land, but from history and memory. UNDR is a collage of images from the past, but it reveals terrible truths that are all too relevant for the present.
This review of UNDR originally published in In Review Online.
On the Battlefield (Little Egypt Collective)
The first work from the Little Egypt Collective (which includes some familiar names from the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab) is a sound-forward film, featuring a sound recordist at a vacant lot where once stood vibrant housing projects. His microphone seems to pick up the echoes of the past, blurring relationships of time along with those of sound and image. One for fans of the sound guys in the Ethnography Lab (Sniadecki, Bonnetta) and of Kevin Jerome Everson, this was one of my favorite films from Cinema du Réel this year.
Us and the Night (Audrey Lam)
Here’s one for lovers of wordplay (red/read, see/sea, aisle/isle) and clothbound books. A pair of young people meet night after night in a university library and explore the many meanings of the texts there. There’s an imaginative Ruizian character to their adventures, but in a much more subdued register, never staging action sequences conventionally but using the university catalogue to visit other universes, cities, seas.