experimental

Sand on the Glass, Leaf in the Pitt

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A good friend recently lent me a DVD compilation of experimental short films from animator Caroline Leaf, titled Out on a Limb. He kept excitingly telling me that Leaf primarily works with a “sand on glass” animation technique, which I struggled to understand in the abstract. In retrospect, the term is pretty self-explanatory. Instead of working with the ink-on-paper or clay-on-wire or code-on-computer techniques of more popular animation styles (hand-drawn, stop-motion, and CG, respectively), Leaf made a name for herself on the 1970s art scene by producing short films entirely animated in beach sand. She’d spread her collected sand across an illuminated table, shaping it to represent all figures & settings captured by the camera. The technique was not entirely novel to her heyday, having been used as a texturing effect at least as far back as Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 landmark The Adventures of Prince Achmed (largely cited as the oldest surviving animated feature film). Leaf was among the first animators to utilize sand-on-glass animation as her primary medium, however, like a chef who only cooks potatoes or a guitarist who works only in arpeggio; it was an experiment in technical limitation.

It turns out, you can do a lot with the simple manipulation of light & sand. In her early experiments “Peter and the Wolf” (1969) & “The Owl Who Married a Goose” (1976), Leaf finds a freedom from the tyranny of setting & geography in her animated sandscapes. Those folktales are retold in a white, boundaryless void where figures transform from one animal to another as the story demands. The wolves, owls, geese, and children drawn in fine-grain beach sand often lose any & all distinctions between their differing animal bodies, turning into and maneuvering around each other in surreal configurations that would be impossible in any other medium. However, her sand-on-glass project didn’t reach its apotheosis until she adapted Franz Kafka’s most famous novella in the 1977 short “The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa.” Her Metamorphosis adaptation is the exact existential bug-transformation crisis you know & love, with the same anything-can-transform-into-anything surrealism of her previous shorts, except with the added limitation of having to actually depict a physical, closed-off setting. It’s her most claustrophobic work in sand-on-glass animation as a result, but its claustrophobic tension is entirely appropriate to the text it illustrates. There’s a muddied, charcoal-drawing style smear to her technique that emphasizes the story’s inherent grime while drawing comparisons between the artist’s solitary production style and her character’s pathetic, socially isolating plight. You cannot fully lose yourself in the story of The Metamorphosis, since the literal fingerprints of the artist conveying it are visible in every gritty frame.

While Leaf did explore other animation techniques, her most recognizable & influential works were rendered in beach sand, to the point where her name is near synonymous with the technique. At least, she was on my mind when diving into the collection of short films animated by Suzan Pitt that are currently hosted on The Criterion Channel. In Pitt’s 2006 short “El Doctor,” her titular hand-drawn doctor ends a drunken bender by hallucinating in the driver’s seat of his car outside a Mexican pub. His blurred vision is overpowered by a gigantic sea creature chasing a man in his impossibly bright windshield, an image illustrated in Leaf’s signature sand-on-glass technique. Later, when the same doctor is visited by an angel, Leaf illustrates the supernatural encounter by scratching that angel directly into the celluloid to accentuate the uncanniness of its image. Notably, this scratching technique was also a favorite got-to for Caroline Leaf’s later career, after she had abandoned beach sand as her primary medium of choice. It’s unclear whether Caroline Leaf was on Suzan Pitt’s mind when making “El Doctor,” but she was certainly on the top of mine while watching it.

Like Caroline Leaf, Suzan Pitt started her animation career with a distinct trademark style before moving on to experiment with other techniques & textures in later works. Her most formidable shorts “Crocus” (1971), “Asparagus” (1979), and “Joy Street” (1995) all reflect her fine-art background as a painter, literalizing the “every frame a painting” cinematic cliché. Pitt would paint her figures on traditional transparent animation cells against a black velvet-style backdrop, but the level of color & detail in her psychedelic fantasy realms far outpaced what you’ll find in the commercial end of the medium. She’s also unconventionally morose for an animator, centering all three of those works on the madness, loneliness, and despair of women isolated in dissatisfying domestic spaces, staring out their windows at the big, scary world outside. In “Crocus,” a woman performs mundane domestic duties like child-rearing, self-primping, and marital sex while occasionally taking breaks to stare out the window and dream of a freer life. In “Asparagus,” a woman struggles to make sense of the alien world outside her window but finds a way to repackage it as a psychedelic stage act for the delight of a bewildered theatre audience. In “Joy Street,” a woman stares at the desolate street life below her window before slitting her own wrists, and is then revived by Fleischer style cartoon characters who relocate her limp body to a Technicolor jungle outside city. All three films feel like funhouse mirror distortions of a lonely, dissatisfied artist’s diary, just as confessional as they are inscrutable, grotesque, and beautiful.

These experiments in form are most compelling in a multimedia approach, something Pitt was aware of early in her career. When her faceless onscreen surrogate puts on a surreal theatrical performance at the climax of “Asparagus,” her audience is rendered in a crude Claymation technique, further alienating the artist from the rest of her fellow citizenry. By the time she incorporated the sand-on-glass and scratched celluloid techniques from Leaf’s work in “El Doctor,” Pitt had already established an anything-goes approach to her animations, incorporating paper dolls, magazine collage, and live actors into her signature fine-art painting style. While Leaf is best known for her work with sand, she also reached her greatest artistic heights when expanding her approach to multimedia techniques — most notably in “Interview,” a short film collaboration with fellow animator Veronika Soul. “Interview” is a dual portrait of the two artists at work, vulnerably gushing about each other and confessing their own personal insecurities while excitedly jumping from one experimental animation technique to the next. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen any filmmaker come to approximating Agnès Varda’s free-flowing autofictional documentary style with any convincing success, and it took two filmmakers working in tandem to accomplish it. It’s also the most I feel like I got to know Caroline Leaf through the content her films, since so much of her most prominent work is more about technique than about personal expression. In contrast, Suzan Pitt lays bare the ugliest, most intimate parts of her own psyche in her signature animations, daring the audience not to look away. Both artists have trapped themselves in an isolating, labor-intensive medium that requires them to work alone in a dark room for untold hours; the difference is largely in whether the proverbial door to that room is locked shut or left open for the audience peer in.

-Brandon Ledet

Deren to Dream

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The biggest shakeup for me on the latest edition of the Sight & Sound Top 100 list was not the much-discussed displacement of Hitchcock’s Vertigo from the #1 slot by Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, but the total elimination of one of the precious few short films on the list: Buñuel & Dalí’s 1920s surrealist landmark Un Chien Andalou. The only thing that lessened the sting of that loss from the canon-defining list was that another surreal masterwork was added to take its place: Maya Deren’s 1940s follow-up Meshes of the Afternoon. Whereas Un Chien Andalou is a free-association free-for-all that defies any ascribed linear narrative, Deren’s later mutation offers more tangible themes, characters, and progression from scene to scene. Remarkably, it loses none of the dream-logic surrealism in the process, simulating the out-of-body experience of a young woman taking an ill-advised afternoon nap and becoming unmoored from reality as a result. Like Un Chien Andalou, its dreamworld iconography is foundational to the artform, recalling monumental works to follow as daunting & disparate as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. Often cited as “The Mother of the Avant-Garde,” Deren collaborated with then-husband Alexander Hammid to translate her artistic background in dance & poetry to reinvent cinema as a medium in works like Meshes. She traveled internationally with her films, staging lectures & debates to reshape public perception of what The Movies are and what they could be. Anyone who watches Meshes of the Afternoon instantly understands her to be one of the medium’s all-time greats, just as worthy of prominence on the Sight & Sound list as Buñuel (who, as of 2022, has fallen off the publication’s prestigious Top 100 list entirely).

So, after years of respecting Deren as one of the all-time greats based on that one title alone, I figured I was overdue to catch up with the rest of her work. Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray disc The Maya Deren Collection is as good of a crash course in her greater catalog as any, making for a much clearer, more concise compendium than the Wikipedia articles listing her most notable works among her unfinished projects. After spending an evening with that collection, it’s clear to me that Deren has at least a trio of films worthy of the all-timer status Meshes now enjoys. 1944’s At Land and 1946’s Ritual in Transfigured Time are just as essential to appreciating Deren’s artistry as Meshes of the Afternoon, something Deren seemed to be aware of herself when she screened that exact trilogy under the banner “Three Abandoned Films” in New York City in 1946, in one of her earliest art-scene triumphs. For its part, At Land feels like a direct beach-trip sequel to Meshes, like those TV movie sequels to sitcoms where the cast goes on a tropical vacation. Deren’s dazed everywoman washes up on a mysterious shore, then impossibly sprints through interior & exterior spaces in the exact looping, interpretive-dance logic she puzzles her way through in Meshes. By the time she made Ritual in Transfigured Time, she feels more firmly rooted in New York City, staging an East Coast cocktail party where guests continually move affectionately towards each other but never convincingly make contact — every single interaction belonging in the next day’s “Missed Connections” newspaper column. As a trio, they hardly feel like Deren’s “abandoned films”; they’re by far her most convincingly complete, accomplished works.

The other Deren titles considered to be her major works all register as camera tests, sparks of ideas put to greater use in her “Three Abandoned Films” masterworks. The most stunning of these camera tests is 1945’s A Study in Chorography for the Camera, in which a muscular dancer spins with such precise, relentless fury that he stops resembling a ballerino and starts resembling a multi-faced deity. That ferocity is again echoed in 1948’s Meditation on Violence, which similarly documents & abstracts the dance-like movements of a Wu-Tang style martial artist, teetering on the border between ballet & violence. By the time Deren got to the 1950s, her ideas were less cutting-edge but no less fascinating, culminating in the film-negative outer space fantasia of 1955’s The Very Eye of Night, in which balletic performers are superimposed over the Zodiacal cosmos. Any one of these shorts would kill as a background projection at a hipster house party or a living room punk show, emphasizing visual splendor over theme or narrative. As a group, they feel like watching an avant-garde filmmaker invent the music video as a medium in real time, which is a bizarre takeaway given that they are intentionally silent, with no sound component to match the musicality of their dancers’ movements. The way she manipulates those movements by playing with projection speeds and backwards looping in the edit are interesting as standalone ideas, but those ideas are put to much more coherent use in, say, the backwards tides of At Land or the freeze-frame human statues of Transfigured Time.

The most baffling entries in Deren’s filmography are the ones where sound was added in later edits. Whereas At Land will feature silent footage characters engaging in a vigorous walk-and-talk, 1947’s The Private Life of a Cat has since been edited to include a narration track that explains every action & intention of its subjects. The result practically feels like an industrial or educational short for a 1950s Biology classroom, to the point where it’s confusing to see it listed as an “experimental film” at all. I cannot tell if that designation carries on because of who made it, when it was made, or because of how notoriously difficult it is to work with cats. In any case, Deren & Hammid document the live birth & early parenting of a litter of kittens in their NYC apartment, later ascribed meaning in narration that compares the domesticity of the modern housecat against the ferocity of their wild-predator ancestors. It’s one of the longest titles and also one of the most straightforward, a combination repeated in her final work, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, which was completed posthumously in the 1970s. Divine Horsemen looks & sounds like Anthropology 101 homework, documenting the dancing rituals of Vodou religious practices, which became a major interest of Deren’s late in her life. At nearly an hour in length, though, the relentlessness of the dancing does gradually evoke a kind of genuine delirium in the audience, especially if you can tune out the dryly academic narration track added after her death. As Deren’s films got less visually experimental, they paradoxically became more aligned with the ritualism of Kenneth Anger’s work, just with different spiritual interests. She was more interested in Vodou than in cinema, only using the latter to access the physical poetry of the former.

Frustratingly, the rest of Maya Deren’s catalog appears to be unfinished or unpublished in one way or another. I could find no useful information about 1949’s Medusa or 1959’s Season of Strangers other than their online listings in her filmography. Meanwhile, 1951’s Ensemble for Somnambulists did not make the cut for the Kino Lorber disc, but once you watch it on YouTube, the reason for its exclusion is immediately apparent. It feels like an early-sketch camera test for the film-negative space ballet of The Very Eye of Night, which itself is already thinly conceived. The only exclusion from Kino’s Maya Deren Collection that I can really fault is 1944’s The Witch’s Cradle, which pulls on the same artistic strings as her masterful trio of “Abandoned Films.” Unlike that now-canonized trio, The Witch’s Cradle was actually abandoned in that it was left unfinished, but its surviving footage (also available on YouTube) features some of her most strikingly surreal, darkly magical images. Its cloistered apartment setting and yarn-stringed spiderwebs suggest that Deren reworked its basic ideas into the more accomplished & coherent Transfigured Time, but it’s got enough of its own distinct texture & personality that I wish she saw the project through to completion. In general, her filmography feels frustratingly incomplete, since cinema only appears to have been one of her many artistic & spiritual interests, among poetry, dance, Vodou ritual, Leftist labor organizing, and whatever else struck her fancy on the fringes of NYC social life. She pounced on the medium with great ferocity, then wandered away from it like a bored housecat, distracted by her next momentary prey. Even the three great works we got out of her before she moved on were self-described as “Abandoned Films,” a series of dreams that she awoke from, dazed.

-Brandon Ledet

Luminous Procuress (1971)

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Like a lot of people, I found Kyle Edward Ball’s childhood nightmare simulator Skinamarink compelling both as an experiment in form (especially in its layering of visual & aural textures) and as a breakout success story (from microbudget outsider art to TikTok meme to wide theatrical distro).  Unlike its loudest, proudest champions, however, I can’t say I was fully captivated with it as a narrative or emotional experience.  I found Skinamarink effectively, impressively creepy, but I can’t say I felt the revelatory breakthrough in form that my fellow horror nerds found in its darkened corners.  I suspect that’s because I’m not a regular visitor to the spooky YouTube channels and creepypasta message boards where Kyle Edward Ball cut his teeth as a short-film director before making a splash in that debut feature.  In a lot of ways, Skinamarink is the exact low-fi creepypasta horror that We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was mismarketed to be, and its most ecstatic praise appears to be coming from creepypasta enthusiasts who are relieved to finally see their online obsessions projected at feature length on the big screen.

I mention all this because I recently did have a revelatory, emotional experience watching a film that shares formal similarities to Skinamarink; it just happened to be steeped in the visual art traditions of drag & genderfuckery instead of online creepypasta lore.  Luminous Procuress is the sole feature film of visual artist Steven Arnold, whose own experimental short-film production & programming happened to be platformed at the legendary Nocturnal Dream Show screenings in 1960s San Francisco, not on YouTube in the 2010s.  I recently purchased a DVD copy of the film’s 50th Anniversary restoration while playing tourist in San Francisco, unfamiliar with its history beyond its proud credit “introducing The Cockettes” – the genderfucked drag krewe that performed as carnival sideshow accompaniment for Arnold’s Nocturnal Dream Show programs.  I was a little worried that a feature-length dose of Cockettes-era hippie drag wouldn’t be able to sustain itself, so I was oddly relieved when it turned out to be an experimental anthology of “silent”, psychedelic vignettes.  Like Skinamarink, Luminous Procuress is a film composed entirely of vibes & textures; those vibes & textures are just slathered in acid & glitter instead of childhood fears & digital grain.

The titular Luminous Procuress is Arnold’s childhood friend & lifelong partner in art, Pandora, posing as a kind of drag queen sorceress in a California hippie commune.  Two himbos wander into her pleasure palace looking for a good time, and the Procuress obliges by guiding them through a series of gorgeous bootleg-drag tableaus: the bejeweled-beard Cockettes posing in tropical Carmen Miranda drag and staging a Last Supper food fight; pre-Deep Throat hardcore sequences shooting straight & bisexual sex as if they were far-out geek show attractions; Kenneth Anger-inspired occultist rituals worshipping a stoic sci-fi futurelord.  Their cumulative effect seeks psychedelic holy ground between the transcendent sensuality of Pink Narcissus and the thrift store glam of Vegas in Space.  Besides Arnold’s auteurist vision as director, The Cockettes’ self-styled Old Hollywood wardrobe, and the glorious “hair creations by Nikki” (modeled by Pandora, naturally), the most important name among the credits is experimental musician Warner Jepson’s, whose noise music soundscapes are almost entirely comprised of synthy bird chirps & shrill baseball stadium organs.  It was Jepsen who provided the film with its deliberately obscured, unintelligible Charlie Brown dialogue track, adding the texture of spoken language without any of the pesky words or meaning of traditional dialogue getting in the way of the tripped-out glam on display.

If there’s any legitimate reason to discuss Skinamarink & Luminous Procuress as a pair, it’s in their shared connections to the experimental cinema foundations of Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou.  Kyle Edward Ball appears to make direct homages to that landmark surrealist short, both in Skinamarink‘s nonsensical time-passing title cards and in its ocular gore.  Steven Arnold’s connections to Un Chien Andalou‘s history is much more direct, as Dalí was such a massive fan of Luminous Procuress that he took Arnold in as a protege in his Court of Miracles.  In all honesty, though, any experimental, surrealist work made after 1929 owes some debt to Un Chien Andalou, so these films are likely only paired in my mind because I happened to watch them the same week.  Both are largely silent, experiential pieces with only the barest of plot structures to justify their liminal-space tableaus.  Of their two premises, I happened to connect much more deeply with a drag queen sorceress asking “Hey, y’all wanna see something weird?” than I did with a childhood nightmare simulation where all doors & windows disappear from a suburban home.  What’s incredibly cool about the two films’ modern distribution is that they’re both widely available outside of the fringe event spaces where experimental works of this ilk would’ve been exhibited a half-century ago: art galleries, universities, and Salvador Dalí’s hotel room. Skinamarink may be a far-out, revelatory work in the context of niche internet media being projected in suburban multiplexes, but it’s also part of a long tradition of experimental filmmaking – including, apparently, 16mm footage of drag queens playing dress-up on LSD.

-Brandon Ledet

The Garden (1990)

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Derek Jarman’s process for creating the look of his 1990 experimental feature The Garden was to put the film through an exhausting gauntlet of format transfers. Shot on super-8, then recorded to video, before finally being printed on 35mm film, the physical shape of The Garden had been put through the ringer to achieve its deliberately scuzzy, highly color-saturated patina. The general effect of the film on the audience is much the same. Non-narrative, mostly dialogue-free, and constantly shifting in both mood & technique, the film feels more like a process meant to break its audience down than it does a piece of creative entertainment. It opens as a vibrant, playful experiment in overlapping visions of homoromantic tableaus & Biblical Christian iconography, but its titular Edenic tone is gradually soured into a somber, morbidly violent affair that loses all of its initial energy to disorganized doom & gloom. It’s exhausting, purposefully so, and it’s easy to leave the film feeling just as worn out as its imagery was by the time it reached its final form.

My assumption is that Jarman intended The Garden’s soul-deep exhaustion to be a kind of diary of his own emotional state in the early 90s. Suffering from a series of AIDS-related health crises at the time of production (a sign of declining health that would eventually end his life just a few years later), Jarman filmed this disjointed series of Biblical tableaus & scenes of homophobic violence around the bleak exteriors of his coastal home in Dungeness, England. Self-described early in the proceedings as a tour though a “wilderness of failure,” the film’s backslide from paradisiac peace into morbid atonement serves as a kind of eulogy to the loss of an entire queer generation to a single virus, one which would eventually claim the filmmaker himself. We open with James Bidgood-esque visions of queer love & harmony (similar to Todd Haynes’s contemporary work in Poison), but the onscreen couple being depicted is eventually arrested, beaten, and shamed into disorder & dissolution. Religious imagery like a lynched Judas dressed as a leather-clad punk shilling credit cards, a young Tilda Swinton appearing as a Madonna figure hounded by paparazzi, and old women playing wine glass tones as the twelve apostles at the Last Supper interrupt this reverie, until it finally sours into an official funeral for the real-life dead in Jarman’s familial circle. The film can be occasionally beautiful, but it’s pretty fucking grim on the whole.

As an aesthetic object, The Garden is wonderfully exciting in its stabs of surreal shot-on-video era imagery. Its experiments in Ken Russellian green screen fuckery in which the entire sky is supplanted with flowers & other poetic, Polaroid-grade images are especially wondrous. The film also clearly has a sense of humor, despite its overall descent into despair, often breaking for absurdist musical numbers – such as a bargain bin music video for the showtune “Think Pink” from Funny Face. I don’t know if it’s the kind of film I’d recommend watching at home, though, where smartphones & other distractions are readily available. Even seeing it digitally restored in a proper theatrical environment (thanks to Zeitgeist’s summer-long queer cinema series Wildfire), I struggled to stay awake for the final 20-minute stretch. Not only is the film deliberately draining its trajectory from Eden to funeral service, it also suffers from the same attention-level difficulty that many feature-length works from directors who mostly work in short films suffer, the same exhaustion that tanks a lot of Guy Maddin’s films. As interesting as each homoerotic image, Biblical tableau, or outbreak of bigoted violence may be in isolation, they never really congeal as a cohesive, unified collection.

Jarman was at least aware of how miserable & patience-testing The Garden would be for his audience. The opening introduction in his woefully sparse narration includes the invitation, “I want to share this emptiness with you.” By the closing sequence wherein Tilda Swinton’s Madonna figure conducts a memorial for the homoromantic Eden lost over the course of the picture (a quiet ceremony involving cheap paper lanterns), I definitely felt that emptiness to some extent. It wasn’t the most pleasant or even the most clearly decipherable feeling to leave a movie theater with, but it was effective nonetheless. If you ever find yourself braving this “wilderness of failure” to “share this emptiness” with Jarman, just go into the journey armed with patience & a willingness to feel hopelessly miserable by the end credits. An experimental art film dispatch from the grimmest days of the AIDS crisis will apparently do that to you.

-Brandon Ledet

The Image Book (2019)

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Before Jean-Luc Godard’s latest essay-in-motion screened at the 2019 New Orleans French Film Festival, a presenter reassured the audience that the projection we were about to see was not broken, glitching, or corrupted. That turned out to be a helpful tip, as The Image Book plays about as smoothly as a gas station rap CD found facedown on parking lot pavement. The audio & imagery of the film alternate from complete darkness & silence to deafening booms & blinding vibrancy to erratic peaks & valleys in-between. Godard’s narration is sometimes subtitled in English, sometimes not, and he’s often cut off in the middle of a vague political or philosophical pontification. Images are frequently shown in their proper aspect ratio for a half-breath before being stretched out into full-screen, over-saturated monstrosities. The Image Book is a deliberately ugly, frustrating experience that strips the art of cinema of all its sensory pleasures in order to punish its audience. If I weren’t watching it with a snooty film festival crowd and if Godard’s name weren’t vouching for the purposeful intent of its sensory aggression, I assume there would have been even more flustered walkouts than the two or three I witnessed at our screening. Listening to old folks & college students intone “Hmmm” & “Ahhh” to themselves during the film as if in an art gallery where they “got” the subliminal meaning of an abstract oil painting was hilarious to me, as Godard did not give us much to work with in establishing patterns in his madness. I suspect most of our audience saw the grueling experience through for the exact reason I did, though: appreciation for the aging, curmudgeonly filmmaker’s audacity, even though he hates our guts for being there.

To his credit, Godard does afford The Image Book a clear sense of structure as a whole, even if its minute to minute rhythms are a dissociative free-for-all. The film is broken into five segments: one for each finger of the hand. This is explained with brief justification about how all art is made by the hands of its creator, which ultimately doesn’t mean much to the themes of the piece, but a guiding sense of structure is still appreciated in this kind of experimental cinema anyway. Three of the five segments seem especially vital to the The Image Book‘s thesis, as vaguely defined as it is: an early section titled “Remake” that pulls & distorts imagery from notable cinema past; a central section that collages imagery of steam trains & Nazi occupation; and a concluding section that offers sympathy to the suffering people of Arab nations who can only express their frustration with their government & Western oppressors through terrorist violence, as all other means have been stripped from them. There’s a lot of bleedover in all these segments, as even the early cinema clips are interrupted by war footage (and home videos of children playing war) and the distorted movie montages themselves continue throughout all five “fingers.” What Godard is trying to say with this assemblage is anyone’s guess. He makes a somewhat clear-eyed distinction between the decadent wealth of the West and the war-torn poverty of the Middle East, but the narration itself is too loosely philosophical to put too fine a point on what he’s saying. Mostly, what comes through is the sadness & anger of an old man who’s getting weary of watching the world burn with no sign of substantial change to come, a frustration he’s eager to pass on to his (mostly Western) audience as punishment. It’s a bleak political treatise that supposes its audience is unworthy of any cinematic pleasure, even the comfort of a clear thesis or narrative.

The Image Book is many things: a movie fanzine, an angry political screed, a flippant troll job, a solemn philosophy piece, a pretentious art film indistinguishable from a parody of itself. The wide range of cinematic relics it pulls from (including titles as varied as Un Chien Andalou, La Belle et la Bête, Elephant, Freaks, Salò, and Johnny Guitar) could easily make for a stunning, moving work of transcendent film fandom, but Godard deliberately uglies them up and robs them of their splendor. This may initially seem pointless when he’s distorting them though color-saturated Xerox copies in stretched-out aspect ratios or interrupting them with footage of war atrocities & hardcore pornography. By the time the film focuses on the atrocities of the now, particularly in the politics of The Gulf, it at least feels like there’s a commanding thesis behind the ugly chaos of it all – if not only in reflecting the ugly chaos of the modern world at large. Attempting any more concrete of a guess on what the French New Wave veteran was getting at with this ugly, fractured, grueling essay in motion could only make me sound like the beatnik lunatics in my audience who were shushing background chatter and whispering “Aha!” to themselves as if they had cracked some intellectual code. This is not a film that allows for a hypnotic, immersive experience; it has all the fluid movement & graceful logic of William S. Burroughs’s herky-jerky cut-ups experiments at their herky-jerkiest. However, it does command a confident, ambitious, righteous anger that I can’t help but be impressed by as a stunned observer, an anger that affords it a one-a-kind novelty as a stream-of-consciousness cinematic tirade.

-Brandon Ledet