Not a single cloud ever seems to drift across this sky, the sun never ceases to send its powerful rays down. Here, in southern California, where the San Andreas Fault has created an unmistakable topography and invisible water currents run under the barren soil, date palms thrive best: feet in water, head on fire. Terra Long has looked around, traced the history of the plants which originally came to North America from the Middle East, and visited the parades and festivities dedicated to the sugary fruit. Layer by layer, she constructs her very own perspective on the landscape and the people, translates her haptic impressions into magnificent 16mm shots and designs a complex soundtrack.

Long manages to join the past and present and produce a concise, quasi sensual extract. The laborious manual pollination of the date palms plays a role in it, as do the collapsed ecosystem of the Salton Sea, archived dresses of Arabian Nights beauty queens and interviews that testify only to what is now historical; as do elderly white couples floating in their pools and walking across the lawns of golf courses. “Feet in Water, Head on Fire” is a document of simultaneity that captivates from the first minute to the last.

Highly focused groups of humans move through nature. It is night and they are listening. Or it is midday and they are counting. Sometimes they carry antennas on their backs and roam meadows at the edge of the forest. They are the witnesses of the so-called sixth extinction, the people who document the disappearance of biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Marianna Milhorat approaches them with patience, spending a long time with women who discuss the intensity of the croaking of frogs, while the roar of the streets can be heard in the background. Others report on the “sea star wasting disease”, a mysterious illness that turns starfish into a whitish mush.
“Just Above the Surface of the Earth” leaves little room for hope, but at the same time puts its faith in the indefatigable individuals who have at least decided not to close their eyes. It is to them that Milhorat dedicates this experimental portrait, sophisticated on all cinematic levels. For it is not only bats that flutter through the film, but also thoughts: by Cormac McCarthy, William Golding, Martin Heidegger, or about the mythical river of the dead, Styx. The score, composed by Brian Kirkbride, translates the various microcosms into immersive sound art, giving us access to a world that we often inhabit as if blind and deaf.

Wang Xilin does not enter the stage in a suite, as the title might suggest, but completely naked. He stretches and bends, appears to familiarise himself with his surroundings, does some vocal exercises, sits down at the piano. Wang Xilin is one of China’s most important composers of contemporary music, having written his first symphonies in his youth. Wang Bing gives the 86-year-old more than a little space. For his portrait, he presents him with the entire Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris.

This is where Wang Xilin reviews his life of torture and oppression, recapitulates the tribulations in communist China, reports knocked-out teeth and nightmares, suicides among intellectuals. His testimony is frequently underlaid, sometimes even drowned out by grandiose musical arrangements. When an orchestra thunders from offscreen, Wang Xilin’s body rears up – “Man in Black” is also an exorcistic oral history. The composer turns himself into his own instrument, into the medium of a violent epoch, sharing his emotions literally unveiled.

After Ulysses S. Grant, the victorious commander of the American Civil War, maverick Jim Finn has now tackled the Apostle Paul. Eighteen centuries lie between the two and yet those historical super-figures have a lot in common. The acts of both were epoch-making, both had to undertake prolonged expeditions to achieve them, and both have inspired a host of propaganda, including numerous board games that also serve as a visual framework for Finn’s latest film. Above all, both remain controversial to this day, though Paul’s actions, due to the thin factual basis, provided and still provide better groundwork for substantially more outlandish interpretations. The films quotes some of the more outrageous ones in an eclectic montage of red-tinged excerpts from biblical epics, Christian fundamentalist talk shows, cartoons, children’s books, dioramas, theme parks and performances by magicians and rapturous choirs.

The curious title refers to a paper of the German theologist Ernst Käsemann, whose research snatched Paul from the grasp of the Antisemites who had usurped him and placed him back in the tradition of Jewish mysticism. That is also the objective of Jim Finn’s film as it gleefully dissects two thousand years of appropriation and propaganda in a wild ride through history.

A series of tuba thefts that occurred ten years ago at Californian schools is the starting point of a multilayered and entertaining reflection about sounds and music, how they are represented in images and described in words. The artist Alison O’Daniel tells the story from the perspective of Deaf people; her film resembles a musical composition that varies its material in several movements.

In one sequence we hear the swelling drone of a passenger plane flying at low altitude over a residential area and gradually drowning out the sounds of the wind before we first see its shadow glide over the houses and at last the source of the noise. The subtitles, an integral part of this film, not only describe the sounds in amazing precision but also quantify their acoustic pressure in decibels.

Alternating between passages with and without sound motivates us to be more differentiated, focused, targeted in our perception. The film revolves around the motifs of hearing, sounds, noise pollution more than around the narrative of the mysteriously vanished tubas, more even than around the impressive protagonist Nyeisha “Nyke” Prince who plays a Deaf drummer in “The Tuba Thieves.” The tuba thefts are first and foremost a metaphor: What does the lack of a specific sound do to our perception?