Plasticity of Forms

The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn, 2019)

Premised on the aftermath of an unexpected meeting on a Vancouver street, The Body Remembers is organized so as to look like a single unbroken take, offering the viewer a hypothetical span of real time. Unlike films such as Birdman, Children of Men, or even Russian Ark, The Body Remembers manages to employ this technique with an impressive subtlety. It takes awhile to even notice the lack of cuts, and again, unlike the films mentioned above, there is a concrete thematic reason for Tailfeathers and Hepburn to present their story as a raw slab of lived time. 

The film begins in the home of Rosie (Violet Nelson), a pregnant First Nations woman living with her volatile, abusive boyfriend. After the start of a violent episode, the scene cuts to Áila (Tailfeathers), who appears to be walking home from work. Áila sees Rosie fleeing the home barefoot, with bruises around her face and neck, and instinctively grabs Rosie by the arm and starts running. The remainder of the film consists of Áila attempting to help Rosie get out of the abusive situation in which she is stuck.

Without saying too much about the ending, I will say that the film's running time is understood to be the entire duration of Rosie and Áila's acquaintance. These two women will never see each other again. During the time we spend with them, the directors highlight the complicated class and racial differences between the two women. While both are First Nations Canadians, Áila is more "white-passing" and upper-middle-class professional; Rosie is underclassed, in the Social Services system, and suspicious that any liberal do-gooder must have an angle. 

If there are faults in The Body Remembers, they are only because of the tension between the film's overt intersectional agenda and the immediacy of its realism. Certain actions, such as Rosie stealing Áila's wallet, feel like false notes, because they are surrounded by so much overt truth. Put another way, Tailfeathers and Hepburn are working the seam between intensively individualized characters and socially edifying "types," and mostly they succeed at this balance where other filmmakers fail. But that also means that the tin-eared moments are a bit more obvious.

PHX (X Is For Xylonite) (Frances Scott, 2019)

This short film, which was featured in this year's NYFF Projections series, would undoubtedly have looked a bit different had I saw it back then. Now, it's impossible not to think of it in conjunction with Todd Haynes' Dark Waters. PHX is a philosophical and scientific inquiry into plastic -- its position relative to other, more organic substances, its functions in the contemporary world, and its infinite malleability. Borrowing from both Roland Barthes and industrial journals, Scott's voiceover provides an almost Heideggerian view of plastic as the final triumph of human endeavor over inert matter.

Formally, Scott depicts this relationship by showing grainy 16mm footage of machines at a plastic factory, overlaid with computer-enhanced mock-ups of glorious, whirling plastic objects. These artifacts frequently mimic the marbled look of quartz or the degraded textures of excavated rock. In this realm, digital imagery is the more "plastic" format, more given to manipulation than the indexical, less forgiving cinematic image.

Scott's view of plastic, and industrial production in general, is ambivalent, if not outright benign. At times PHX recalls Alain Resnais' early short film Song of Styrene in its celebratory tone, gazing at a modern marvel that, in a few decades, will be collecting in landfills and the stomachs of dolphins and whales. This would make a good double-feature with Dark Waters, since it presents synthetic material as neither boon nor bane, but simply as another great I Am, something that is literally coursing through the world's veins.