Prismatic Ground reviews (from In Review Online)

Where Is This Street? or With No Before or After (João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra de Mata, 2022)

Part of what’s so great about the Prismatic Ground festival is that it makes space for genuine cinematic curios, works that are sufficiently distinct from usual modes of creation that they might otherwise slip through the cracks. That is definitely the case for Where is This Street?, a ravishing city symphony / film history examination by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra de Mata. Their previous collaborative feature, 2012’s The Last Time I Saw Macao, was equally gorgeous, as the pair examined the space and architecture of that Asian city. With Where is This Street?, they are considering a subject much closer to home. That is literal, since most of the film is shot near the Roma subway station in Lisbon, where the filmmakers make their home. While this local focus was somewhat circumstantial (the film was shot during Covid-19 lockdown), it was also a result of a provocative film-historical coincidence.

Rodrigues and de Mata live in an apartment that belonged to Rodrigues’ grandparents, and as it happens, a key Portuguese film was shot right across the street. The Green Years (1963) by Paulo Rocha was the opening salvo of a new wave of Portuguese filmmaking, beginning in the waning years of the Salazar dictatorship. Influenced by early Godard, The Green Years focused on two young lovers, Júlio (Rui Gomes) and Ilda (Isabel Ruth) who are new to Lisbon and discovering both the wonders and iniquities of the big city. (The Green Years was recently re-released by the good folks at Grasshopper Film.)

Rodrigues and de Mata have produced a tribute to the earlier film, in the idiom of hauntology. Through slow, deliberate tracking shots, obtuse architectural angles, and close attention to the area’s vibrant landscape, they have retraced the locations of The Green Years, producing a film that is almost entirely devoid of human life, instead luxuriating over shadow sand surfaces. And, as if simultaneously honoring Rocha’s film and welcoming life back to Lisbon, the film concludes with a cameo by Isabel Ruth, now a spry 83 years old. Where is This Street? seems likely to become one of a handful of artistic endeavors occasioned by the pandemic but that will resonate long afterward. It’s as stately and poetic as the pair’s other 2022 film, Will-o’-the-Wisp, is madcap and exuberant. It’s not to be missed.

Bibi Seshanbe (Saodat Ismailova, 2022)

Bibi Seshanbe, by Uzbek filmmaker Saodat Ismailova, is a multi-layered work, one that explores the role of women in contemporary Uzbekistan by considering the complex intersection of the traditional and the modern, the material and the mythic. With its origins in an installation work for Documenta 15, Bibi Seshane is a rich, sensuous work that treats tradition as neither a hindrance nor a nostalgic link to a nobler past. Instead, Ismailova treats Uzkek folklore as a “social fact,” in the Durkheimian sense. It exists and serves to provide meaning for contemporary lives, as a tapestry of available metaphors.

The subject of the film is Bibisora Aripova, a doctor who works with injured or abused women who have been shunned by their families. We see Aripova at work, examining and counseling the women under her care. But we also see her as a more general, mythic presence throughout Bibi Seshanbe. The film is based in part on a Central Asian blessing ritual, the Bibi Seshanbe Ona, or “the lady of Tuesday.” It is part Cinderella story, part atavistic animal lore, and also informed by Zoroastrianism. This syncretic ritual is performed by various women, including Aripova, as a part of everyday life. One aspect of the ritual has to do with the tactile manipulation of flour in preparation for baking bread. Much like a Turkish tea-leaf reading, the Bibi Seshanbe Ora entails interpreting the rifts and pockets in the flour, looking for significant signs and figures.

Like a number of other films featured in this year’s Prismatic Ground festival, Bibi Seshanbe could be considered an unorthodox ethnography. In the vein of Robert Gardner, or better yet Ulrike Ottinger’s massive Central Asian film Taiga, Ismailova’s work withholds explanation, preferring to provide a sensual tapestry that can envelop the attentive viewer. It is easy to suspect that its power derived in part from its conception as a video installation, where the artist can spatialize her images, affording a sense of simultaneity that can only be approximated here through montage. Nevertheless, Bibi Seshanbe provides a feminist consideration of life in Uzbekistan, one that, in the words of Trinh T. Minh-ha, declines to “speak about,” preferring to simply “speak nearby.”

three sparks (Naomi Uman, 2023)

The new feature from Naomi Uman is a three-part documentary portrait of life in the town of Rabdisht, Albania. Taking certain cues from experimental ethnographers such as Trinh T. Minh-ha and Jonas Mekas, Uman works to establish a coherent sense of place and culture, and then begins to break down those apparent certainties. Uman has been working in this nonfiction mode for quite some time, but many may remember her earlier short films, which worked with the physical material of the filmstrip in order to produce wry social commentary. Her best-known film from that period, Removed (1999), took a passage from a late-60s / early 70s porno and meticulously removed the images of women using nail polish remover. The resulting film displayed aroused men canoodling with amorphous blobs of light.

In many ways three sparks is a somewhat more conventional film. Although the first part, shot on 16mm, displays scratches, flares, and other blemishes on the celluloid itself, we are mostly shown the everyday activities of the people of Rabdisht. Uman interrupts the movement from scene to scene with title cards that provide historical data, identify the people in the film, and generally serve to explain what it is we are seeing. This is a fairly straightforward denotative maneuver, in keeping with the traditional methods of ethnographic cinema.

As the film progresses, however, Uman becomes more focused on the specific individuals in front of her camera, rather than the cultural atmosphere that has, in part, produced them. (Uman repeatedly provides full-length portraits of her subjects, especially the women, starting from their faces and panning down, paying particular attention to their shoes.) The final section shifts from film to digital video, and is much more motivated by the subjects themselves. They position the camera at odd angles to show themselves making bread or watching TV, and in one instance a young girl throws the camera into a pile of clothes on her bedroom floor, as if casting the entire project aside.

There are a number of key concepts to which Uman repeatedly returns. One of them is the Albanian concept of besa, wherein it is the highest moral injunction to be cordial, welcoming, and neighborly. While this usually pertains to acts of everyday grace, Uman explains that it was besa that compelled both Christian and Muslim Albanians to hide their Jewish neighbors from the Nazis during the war. It also serves to explain why religious strife is rare in Albania, relative to other Eastern European nations. Three sparks also discusses the concept of the “sworn virgin,” in which women take on masculine identities and are granted all the privileges of traditional Albanian patriarchy. While Uman is correct that this suggests a certain acceptance of gender fluidity, it’s clear that it only works in one direction. As we see in the anti-trans initiatives around the world, female masculinity confuses patriarchy, but male femininity is intolerable. Three sparks suggests that perhaps we can learn from Albanian culture, but in some regards we may be all too similar.

Fugue (John Gianvito, 2022)

John Gianvito is one of the most daring experimental documentarians working today, and a new film from him is always welcome. A bit of a lone wolf in the film world, Gianvito is an American independent aligned with no movement or genre, making films on his own timetable and on his own terms. Recently he scored an unexpected “hit” with Her Socialist Smile, his lovely and insightful film biography of Helen Keller. Using various techniques such as separating sound and image, or rendering speech as text, Gianvito offered formal correlatives to Keller’s own means of processing and generating information. And, in an unanticipated bit of synergy, Her Socialist Smile was screening in theaters around the same time a host of Internet loonies began insisting that Keller never actually existed. (At least no one claimed she helped fake the moon landing.)

Fugue finds Gianvito returning to his roots in the political avant-garde, where he stands alongside such mavericks as Jon Jost and Peter Watkins. This is a film about the war In Ukraine, but more than that, it is about the dissonance between that tragedy as actually experienced versus its depiction in Western media. The film begins with a series of electronic street advertisements in Boston, reminding passers-by about the need to support Ukraine, and then going on to promote soft drinks or cognac. Most of Fugue consists of a first-person view of a series of walks into the woods, at various times of the year. This is interrupted by media images, some from the present-day Russian offensive, others taken from two World War II documentaries by Ukrainian master Alexander Dovzhenko.

The final passage of the fifteen-minute film features a reading of a poem by the Polish writer Mieczysław Jastruń. In fragmented images, it describes the experiential chaos of life under siege, while Gianvito continues into the snow-covered woods. One dominant image that recurs several times is that of a frozen lake, with a strangled current of water moving just below the surface. It is a potent metaphor for the lifeworld of a people, cruelly interrupted but still persisting, waiting for the thaw.

What Are the Wild Waves Saying? (Declan Clarke, 2022)

In a bit of festival synergy, this year’s Prismatic Ground features a pair of films that share several procedures and concerns. Janaína Nagata’s Private Footage uses the discovery of a home movie from South Africa to illuminate some seldom explored aspects of the history of Apartheid. Likewise, Declan Clarke’s What are the Wild Waves Saying? zeroes in on a small corner of Irish literary history in order to elucidate unexpected links between Ireland, the IRA, and Nazi Germany. The film focuses on the role of Francis Stuart, played by Clarke himself in a series of stark, ascetic reenactments. Stuart was an Irish nationalist who conducted radio broadcasts for the Nazis between 1940 and 1944. Stuart, like a number of Irish radicals and IRA supporters, thought that by supporting the Axis powers, they were helping to destabilize their enemies in Great Britain, a classic case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

As Wild Waves articulates, the unique power of radio to traverse physical distance permitted Stuart and other political dissidents across the spectrum – fascist to Bolshevik – to reconfigure their idea of a homeland, seeing in Hitler’s pan-European fanaticism a chance to identify against the English and with a new order, one in which they could be equal partners. Of course, some of these men were Irish fascists who hoped the Third Reich would dismantle the decadent democracies of the U.K. and the U.S. Others were little more than opportunists.

Clarke is an extreme formalist. His reenactments are spare and stilted, all characterized by the deliberate choice to exclude the human voice from an otherwise sync-soundtrack. With its fixed camera and blocky compositions, Wild Waves recalls certain post-Straubian filmmakers such as Ricky D’Ambrose and especially Ted Fendt. By the end of the film, as Clarke slowly tours the grave sites of these traitorous men, I was reminded of John Gianvito’s Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, a film that similarly examines historical meaning etched into the landscape. Having said this, there is a lugubrious, at times stifling quality to Clarke’s film, as if the director were determined to counteract the basic elements of cinema, such as rhythm and movement. While I do find Clarke’s project compelling, I am not certain that he has located the best possible formal strategies from realizing it. Nevertheless, I’m glad to have become acquainted with this filmmaker’s work, and will be very interested to see what he does next.

Private Footage (Janaína Nagata, 2022)

Given that found-footage films comprise their own subgenre of experimental cinema, we might say that within that category exists an even smaller, more specific subset. That’s composed of films that are essentially close examinations of a particular piece of footage, resulting in works that turn the documentary process on itself, producing films that essentially ask us to relearn how to see historical footage. There are certain key works that established this sub-subgenre, including Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929), Ken Jacobs’ Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969), and various films by Yervant Gianikian and the late Angela Ricci Lucchi, the best known of which is probably their 1987 look at cinematic colonialism, From the Pole to the Equator. This remains a vital strain of analytical filmmaking, as seen in the found-footage documentaries of Sergei Loznitsa, or the recent Three Minutes – A Lengthening.

Private Footage by first-time director Janaína Nagata, takes this approach in an entirely new direction, one that is bold but not entirely successful. The film is built around nineteen minutes of 16mm film that Nagata acquired when purchasing a take-up reel. As it turns out, this “private footage” was shot in Apartheid-era South Africa, much of it apparently comprised of home movies shot by an upper-level government functionary. While Nagata does not work to identify the man whose family appears repeatedly in the film (especially during the first half, which depicts a vacation in the coastal city of Durban), she does zero in on a great many images and details in the footage, conducting seemingly real-time research to explore the various historical resonances of this otherwise negligible film.

After screening the original footage in its entirely, Nagata employs a split-screen computer desktop composition, whereby she plays the film on the left-hand side of the screen while opening various windows and programs on the right side. This allows her to conduct searches on place and company names, use a facial recognition search engine to identify various figures in the footage, and introduce outside media – interviews, news reports, and other archival material – to create a broader context for what we are seeing play out on the left.

The result is strangely reminiscent of the deconstructed foodstuffs of haute cuisine. Nagata isn’t producing a documentary so much as displaying all of the research process that would ordinarily serve as the background for a nonfiction essay film. At first this seems novel, as Nagata pauses the found footage and, for example, opens Wikipedia or Google Maps on the other side of the desktop. But eventually it becomes maddening, as the filmmaker shows herself searching YouTube, then playing a clip without even clicking to close the pop-up ads. At one point, Nagata hits a paywall for a site she’s using and purchases the program in the middle of her work. Private Footage actually shows Nagata entering her full credit card number, including expiry and CVV. It’s truly bizarre.

The film does introduce compelling historical background regarding the life and career of “architect of Apartheid” H.F. Verwoerd, as well as his informal advisor, a millionaire Bantu “witch doctor” by the name of Khotso Sethuntsa. A more conventional approach might have been to locate these men in the footage and then extrapolate outward, showing the wider impact that they had on South African history and culture. But Private Footage seems to have other interests, such as trying to display the current state of online investigation, performing the “deep dive” that the Internet permits. This is a distraction at best, a gimmick at worst, and suggests that we’ve been watching notes toward a documentary rather than the thing itself.

A Movement Against the Transparency of the Stars of the Seas (Esy Casey, 2022)

The latest film by Filipina director Esy Casey (Here After) is a 37-minute featurette that unfolds entirely in split-screen, and although it seems like it might have been conceived as a gallery installation work, it is quite potent as a single screen presentation. Casey uses the division of the image, and the mediation of distance through communication devices, as a concrete representation of an immigrant experience all too common in contemporary culture. Filipina women are forced to leave their own children behind in order to travel to foreign countries, where they frequently perform domestic labor. That’s to say, these women are raising other people’s children – caring for them, cleaning up after them, providing them emotional support – while their own children are thousands of miles away.

Esy conveys this divided consciousness through sonic as well as visual means. There is a first-person narration throughout Movement, simultaneously read in English and Cebuano. Without the narration (in both languages) appearing onscreen, it would be very difficult to parse what she is saying, and of course this is the point. The conflict between home and away, a familiar and an unfamiliar culture, results in a fraught, muddled subjectivity. Again, if this were presented in a gallery context, I’d expect the two voices to be spatialized, allowing the viewer to move closer to one and further away from the other.

In its patient, poetic articulation, Movement is a deeply melancholy film, Esy making quite palpable the feeling of losing a relationship in real time, in some respects mourning for a loved one who is still very much alive. Bearing traces of both the affective acuity of Miko Revereza and the formalist analysis of Ursula Biemann, Movement poignantly describes the human toll of asymmetrical globalism, in which many laborers aren’t permitted the basic dignity of “home.”