53rd New York Film Festival's Projections NEW YORK CITY OCTOBER 2-4, 2015 Formerly named Views from the Avant-Garde, the New York Film Festival's (NYFF) experimental sidebar, Projections, showcased new works from old mainstays at the festival (Ben Rivers, Ben Russell, Lewis Klahr, and Jodie Mack) as well as those making their appearance in the festival for the first time (Isiah Medina, Nicolas Pereda, Jon Rafman, and Cecile B. Evans). While last year's Projections featured thirteen programs made up of sixty-three films and videos, the bounty of art was smaller this year, with fifty-four titles screened across fourteen programs. Despite the reduction, the essential NYFF sidebar still contained a wealth of work to discover. Amid the abundance was a set of films and videos in which artists planted figures in landscapes, mapped out domestic spaces, or opened portals and paths to that labyrinthine maze, the internet. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Pereda's oneiric Minotaur (2015), characters in an apartment sleep, wake, read, eat, look, smoke, and repeat. These actions permutate over the course of the film, bringing to mind Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961). For nearly every scene, Pereda shoots a single static wide shot. If they are not still, the three principle characters flow in and out of the inert frame, somnambulants drifting through the semi-dark apartment. Minotaur becomes quieter and quieter as it progresses. Servants come and go, cleaning up and paying no attention to the trio splayed half-on and half-off their beds, tangled in sheets. Pereda creates an insular world, one consisting of variations of mundane actions in domestic spaces. He abstracts daily life, perhaps commenting on Mexico's hermetic leisure class. From interiors to exteriors, Lois Patino sets his Night Without Distance (2015) in and around the Geres Mountains that border Portugal and Galicia. He opens the medium-length film with a lyrical passage by poet Teixeira de Pascoaes, who writes about trails of souls in landscape. What follows is a series of shots in which people, often motionless, stand near boulders twice their size, beside river streams, and outside forlorn villages. They're embedded in the environment, these smugglers of the past and present. Patino uses the negative of color reversal film, giving Night a phantasmal look that skews spatiotemporal relations. Each shot dazzles and disorients; landscapes appear eerily luminescent with their vapor-like greens, whites, and especially purples. Further scattering one's sense perceptions, Patino manipulated the sound in postproduction so as to subtly foreground it. These static figures planted in the landscape speak in hushed tones about crossing the border. They are smugglers transporting contraband on this centuries-old pirate route through the mountains. With flashlights and rifles nuzzled in the crook of their arms, they are on watch, looking out for any signs of danger. If the people are still, the camera is not. Slow lateral tracks cause each shot to toggle to the right or to the left, leading to a startling final extreme overhead long shot in which figures oh so slowly and stealthily move through the landscape--haunted blotches of color in an otherworldly terrain. Extreme long shots are one of several formal principles governing Rivers's The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers (2015). Shooting in rural Morocco and the Atlas Mountains, Rivers alternates between extreme long shots of figures drifting across arid, rocky land, and cutaways to actors resting in nooks and crannies. After all, Sky Trembles is partly a behind-the-scenes film about filmmaking, reminiscent of one of Rivers's acknowledged influences, Pere Portabella's Cuadecuc, vampir (1971). At the beginning of the film, Rivers shoots Oliver Laxe directing his Las Mimosas (which is now in postproduction). …
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Dec 1, 2022
B Ruby Rich 
Open Access
