Adventures in perception at NYFF.
In the most literal sense, NYFF’s Currents programming represents a return to form for an artistic medium that too often finds itself bogged down with preoccupations of a textual persuasion. The vulgarities of plot, dialogue, and the explicit are replaced by an intermedial visuality that unlearns the eye and drags it towards uncharted territory. Currents Program 3 (Surface Noise) achieved just this effect with its unyielding and abstruse gestures towards legends of the avant-garde, featuring a roster of artists united only by their devotion to the blurry edge of experimentation.
Simon Liu’s Procedures represented the most thematically ambitious work of the evening, a multimedia-infused kaleidoscope of hazy superimpositions woven across Hong Kong’s urban hum. Interdictions of form and object lay central to the film, contrasted with a meandering repetition of setting, color, and camera movement. This results in an artistic logic that holds overt sensory provocation and subliminal stimulation in equal regard. It renders a phenomenon not unlike that of our experience within the untethered chaotic ether of the digital information environment, as implied by Liu in the post-screening Q&A. Here he strikes a resonant chord that apprehends coherence across an otherwise frenetic landscape of imagistic reverie, excavating the personal and familiar to evoke the universal in an inventive and almost spectral manner.
Karissa Hahn’s Moored Shadow stood out as the most self assured and quietly transgressive work, a four minute microshort sparing sound and color at a fixed point rooted within a woodland clearing. Immersion is near instantaneous, and the visuals may feel eerily familiar to those who have crossed paths with Andy Warhol’s Shadows (a three year curatory fixture at Dia Beacon). Hahn’s compositional austerity is augmented by an interspersion of whip-like camera pans, steady enough to maintain the setting’s structural integrity while seeming irrational enough to unnerve and unmoor. The wooded daytime scene is at once transfigured, an inversion of light and tone that gestures towards the latent and calls the eye deeper into the image. There’s something haunting and meditative to the work, its simplicity belied by a torrent of implication and emotional reverberation.
Currents Program 4 (The Real World) eschews the radically abstract for experimental works with a touch of narrative propulsion. Best of all is Calum Walter’s Certainties, a gently cyclical visual rumination of suburban proportions, a mix of first person hand held POV footage and rigid surveillance camera-sourced panopticism. At the fore of the confines in question is the quiet town of Tujunga in northern Los Angeles County. Situated at the edge of the Angeles National Forest, its streets are stalked by man and animal alike, as bears and coyotes make their way across front and backyards with alarming nonchalance. The shots are restrained but the film feels texturally rich, and the fecundity of color and earthly forces imply something both ominous and profound about what we have wrought with our Faustian ambitions. Repetition and unpredictability cohabit harmoniously throughout the runtime, as the film’s structure likens itself to the rhythms of nature and its elemental forces. Within this visual space is the distance and immeasurable intimacy that defines our relationship to the world around us.
