NYFF Currents 1 (a mixed bag)

In Flow of Words (Eliane Esther Bots, 2021)

In Flow of Words is an admirable film about an important topic. And while it is constructed with care and a fair amount of formal intelligence. Still, I feel a certain ambivalence toward it, since it adopts only slightly unconventional means to tell its story -- the psychological toll that Bosnian war crimes trials took on those working as translators. Bots' film is primarily about the professional challenges faced by these three individuals: Alma Imamovic, Besmir Fidahic, and Nenad Popovic Pops. 

After all, their job is to be an uninflected conduit for the language of testimony, but they are human beings (and Bosnians) who are inevitably affected by the words they must translate. This basic problem, however, is depicted by having them lie on hotel beds, listen to recorded testimonies, or use objects of their own (such as plastic toy animals) to represent these complex relationships. It isn't clear that any of these interventions contribute anything to Bots' primary discourse, and so I'm not sure why she chose to organize In Flow of Words in an even nominally unconventional way. 

Sycorax (Matías Piñeiro and Lois Patiño, 2021)

A truly impressive combination of two artistic sensibilities that I wouldn't have thought belonged together, Sycorax exhibits the literary gamesmanship of Piñeiro's feature film work while situating it within and alongside Patiño's own highly refined style. Initially, Piñeiro seems to have the upper hand, since Sycorax is partly another of his playful, allusive engagements with Shakespeare. Instead of tackling The Tempest full-on, though, he adopts an almost Stoppardesque deconstruction, focusing on a character -- Ariel's mother, the sorceress -- who never speaks a line of dialogue. Treating Sycorax as a structuring absence, Piñeiro looks for her everywhere, first among random women on the street, and then through an extended audition sequence.

But Sycorax also focuses on Ariel's entrapment within a tree in the forest, and this allows Patiño to draw our attention to the thick, complex textures of natural forms. Close-ups of bark and foliage alternate with expansive wide shots of the forest, light peeking through trees, rock formations and waterfalls. Employing slow fades from one image to the next allows Patiño's unique engagement with landscape and abstraction to envelop the film like a proscenium, a sylvan clearing providing a primitive stage-set.

I don't mean to suggest that there was some clear-cut division of labor between Piñeiro and Patiño. Their aesthetic tendencies combine quite effortlessly, even as one can observe moments that recall both men's previous work. It's unusual to see two such strong artistic personalities meld so gracefully, and this is part of the pleasure of Sycorax, a film that provides much more than either filmmaker could offer on his own.

(No Subject) (Guillermo Moncayo, 2021)

One can detect notes of Borges and Raúl Ruiz in (No Subject), a 30-minute featurette that starts out by telling the story of a zookeeper undergoing rehab following a major car accident, reconnecting with his estranged daughter in the process. The film is defined by this strong meta-framework, only to open onto a narrative mise-en-abyme, as the filmmaker begins telling a story about making said zookeeper film, and thinking aloud about how it relates to his own experiences with his father. 

Moncayo has an eye, and organizes (No Subject) with nice, clean lines and brightly lit, planimetric compositions. But it is a frustratingly overt film, announcing its intentions and then following through with them in smart but unmysterious ways. I hope that this NYFF section isn't dominated by world narrative cinema calling-card shorts, but I am beginning to worry that Currents is becoming a sort of farm team for ND/NF. I'll keep an open mind though.

Dreams Under Confinement (Christopher Harris, U.S.)

I'd seen this last year, since it is a part of the Wexner Center's Cinetracts '20 collection. But since it is indeed one of the strongest contributions, I'm glad to see it is now gaining traction as a stand-alone short. Harris has consistently been one of the most politically insightful filmmakers working in the avant-garde. His films always generate tension between the subject under consideration -- lynching (Reckless Eyeballing), religious pageantry (28.IV.21), the role of the Black intellectual (Halimuhfack) -- and an insistence that we interrogate our basic habits of seeing and hearing. Dreams Under Confinement is no exception.

In this frantic three-minute work, Harris uses Google Earth to visually penetrate the city of Chicago, plunging us down into the streets and then back up again for a mobile, pivoting look from above. This movement suggests an unobstructed view of Chicago as a technological surveillance zone, even as its speed makes a lot of what we're seeing rather illegible. Harris joins this hyper-reality with a recording of Chicago PD radio communication, in which a dispatcher describes potential or presumed criminals ("a tall Black male") and the cops in the field reveal their anxieties, which they manage through raw aggression ("get the motherfucker!"). Dreams shows that the vast amounts of information produced by companies like Google are subject to interpretation, and that the ability to interpret that data is almost always held by the police, whose vested interests rely on the unilateral exercise of power.