Teal (Björn Kämmerer, 2019)

Given the structuralist nature of the work, you might expect Björn Kämmerer's new film Teal to have a nice round number of shots. But nope. It has 204. I can't say that I know exactly why, except that having 204 instead of an even 200 seems to set up the expectation for a clean pattern only to break it, and breakage is precisely what this film is about. With each passing second, Kämmerer, whose camera is trained on a neutral black background, has the image sliced vertically by a piece of teal glass, dropped into the camera's path from above the frame of reference. The glass is parallel to the camera axis and and screen, and just as the bottom of the sheet is about to exit the frame, it hits some sort of solid base, which shatters it.

This performative maneuver happens with the regularity of clockwork. It is only after about half a minute that we pry ourselves loose from the metronomic pulse of the film and become attuned to Teal's subtler aspects. For instance, Kämmerer cuts the shots just a split-second after the glass shatters, so we see flying shards that seem to vanish, and parts of the pane that don't fall all the way to the unseen ground. And although we start to notice rather quickly that these seemingly identical glass sheets all fracture in somewhat different ways, as we look more closely we also start to notice the exact opposite. Some of these shots are repeated.

We can start to accustom our eyes to the fine distinctions between similar shapes -- a flamelike pattern here, an egg-crack division there. And as we see them recur, we wonder just how many times Kämmerer actually repeated this procedure, and how many times we'll be expected to watch it. So in a way, Teal represents a sly conceptual paradox. It's a film about the precise characteristics of materials (the fault lines that exist in sheets of glass, the pressure points that happen in each individual drop), that is, a sculptural action. But it is also about our capacity to perceive that set of actions, when they are happening, and when they are not. So Teal (a film about painted glass, let's remember) is simultaneously a work of minimalist abstraction and photorealist trompe l'oeil.