Something Between Us
(Jodie Mack, 2015)
Writing about Projections Program 2 feels very freeing for me. Unlike other reviews for longer films, which feel as though the narrative of the film always restrains them, where describing plot feels like an obligation, Projections Program 2, a collection of short avant-garde films, allows for a more creative, looser review. The series of films in Projections Program 2 privileged the images, the particular film stock, and the manipulation of film stock. The films featured in Projections Program 2 were Prima Materia (Charlotte Pryce); Intersection (Vincent Grenier); Port Noir (Laura Kraning); Centre of the Cyclone (Heather Trawick); Le Pays Dévasté (The Devastated Land, Emmanuel Lefrant); Cathode Garden (Janie Geiser); Something Between Us (Jodie Mack); and brouillard – passage 15 (Alexandre Larose).
Projections Program 2 contained some of my favorite moments of the festival, primarily because the images escape definition. I could attempt to explain the films all I wanted to the other fellows after the screenings, yet the on-screen experimentation goes beyond the technology of language. Yet, I’ll here try to describe, as best as language can, those avant-garde and technically challenging moments in Projections Program 2.
All the films in Projections 2 share a common thread: an interest in materiality. Whether via a filmmaker playing with the material of film itself, or a film examining material, both close and far, the films all work to sharpen our understanding of our material surroundings, an exploration of the tactile. From the eight films, I found three that provided images and moments that still strongly resonate with me.
brouillard – passage 15
(Alexandre Larose, 2014)
Larose’s brouillard – passage 15 is excitingly mesmerizing. Larose uses in-camera temporal exposures to ingrain multiple shots of the same path onto the same piece of film stock. The result reminds me of the tralfamadores from Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five. You feel as though you can see into the fourth dimension: the path down which Larose moves his camera is the same, but the layers of multiple takes literally stack time, placing one journey overtop another. In one shot, a man walks down the path as Larose’s camera moves toward its destination, the lake beyond his family’s cottage. The man’s motions are unclear, though; almost foggy, ghastly beneath the other takes when he was not there. Brouillard asks us to take a closer look at the familiar. Larose transforms a potentially mundane and familiar path into a new spectacle; one can find an attractive moment in any frame of Larose’s piece, an element of the photogénie shines through in every take, happily overwhelming at times as your eyes dart across the screen searching through a particular moment through the filter of multiple others.
Grenier’s Intersection works as a juxtaposition between the natural and the mechanical. Grenier places his camera at an intersection near Ithaca, NY, to capture the daily dance among nature, car, and road. Intersection jostles between shots of a flower-filled corner of a road and shots of cars zooming by, blurring the screen and eclipsing the foliage. Grenier replaces the colors of the flowers with that of the speeding cars, their paint streaking across the frame like an impressionistic brushstroke. Grenier perfectly selects his stills to capture the images of vehicles in their most distorted and stretched forms, frozen masses of kinetic energy. Additionally, while most films lacked a score, Grenier utilizes the sounds of cars passing, which, matched with the constant movement between his frames, grants an illusion of movement. Intersection presents our daily act of transportation as a disruption of one idea of beauty, of our ability to perceive our natural environment; but Grenier also generates a different aesthetic with the disrupting cars: Grenier’s palette consists of the colorful burst of the cars onto the screen.
Speaking brilliantly to film’s interaction with and transformation of material, Jodie Mack’s Something Between Us utilizes the old jewelry of a former costume designer to create a wonderful ballet of light and crystal. Her film acts as both a new way of looking at her mentor’s jewelry, while also preserving and glorying it. The jewelry, which Mack films in front of a dark, black background, sparkles and shines as light passes through its various facets. The material in play, the jewelry, acts as a catalyst for the light that passes through the film stock; the prisms of color glimmer and amplify the light that Mack carefully hones against the jewelry.
Intersection
(Vincent Grenier, 2015)
The Projections screening was truly wonderful, and I feel remiss that with a word count to adhere to, I can only mention portions of what was a thoughtfully curated program. Having little experience with avant-grade film, I was surprised at my enthusiastic response and would strongly suggest encourage festival attendees to enjoy future NYFF Projections Programs. Aside from taking a break from formal narratives, which often demand more attention, the Projections series encourages a new perspective toward the medium, one that might even have you appreciating the smaller moments in those larger, marquee films.
Author Biography
Connor Newton is a senior English-Film Studies major at Hendrix College and a co-president of the Hendrix Film Society. Connor enjoys the films of Wes Anderson, as well as other films dealing with adolescence, such as Les quatre cents coups by François Truffaut. In the future, Connor plans on working at a brewery in Little Rock, continuing to study films and write on the side.
Mentor Biography
Kristi McKim is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film Studies at Hendrix College, where she was awarded the Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shivley Odyssey Professorship, honored as the 2014-15 United Methodist Exemplary Professor, and nominated for the CASE U.S. Professors of the Year Award. Her publications include the books Love in the Time of Cinema (2011) and Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change (2013), in addition to pieces in Camera Obscura, Studies in French Cinema, Senses of Cinema, Film International, The Cine-Files, and Film-Philosophy.
Department Overview
Hendrix College offers a major in English with an emphasis in Film Studies and a minor in Film Studies. This growing program within an intimate and rigorous liberal arts college environment includes a variety of courses in the history and theory of film and media, alongside co-curricular experiences (such as this trip to the New York Film Festival) generously made possible through the Hendrix-Odyssey Program. Extracurricular film-related groups include Hendrix Film Society and Hendrix Filmmakers.
Film Details
Projections Program 2
Curated by Dennis Lim, Ally Nash, Gavin Smith
Films from the USA and Canada
Runtime 3-18 minutes
Follow this link to read the introduction to this set of reviews: https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/2016/05/21/2015-new-york-film-festival-introduction/
