Where the sandy beach of the Salton Sea, the biggest lake in California, begins to crunch harder, it does not even consist of sand any more: Millions of dead fish, plants and insects pile up on the shore to form a highly toxic substance. This is how Derek explains it, a member of a Cahuilla tribe that managed to escape an attempted genocide in the 19th century to the Salton Sea and now sees itself as a protective force for the once flourishing but increasingly deserted area and its outcasts.
Derek is one of the many locals whose trails Lukas Marxt and Vanja Smiljanić calmly follow, gliding with them through the desolate landscapes. In the process, they pick up slivers of nuclear history time and again: During the Second World War, the area was a test site for the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The experiments continued through the Cold War; the armed forces are still training here. The film finds its starting point and end two states away: The nuclear devices were sent on their way from Wendover, Utah. The local Airfield Museum pays tribute to their development. Once, the camera performs an almost weightless dance around a model of the Hiroshima bomb “Little Boy” on display there, to the sounds of the indestructible World War classic “We’ll Meet Again.”
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze recognised „a new type of actor” in the films of the Nouvelle Vague: professional non-professionals who do not just recite dialogue but act as a medium for our perception. Two of them were uppermost in his mind: Jean-Pierre Léaud and her, Bulle Ogier. The French performer has appeared in nearly 100 films over a period of more than 50 years. However, the masterpieces she was involved in were often not appreciated as such by her contemporaries but, as critic Philippe Azoury puts it, regarded as child’s play.
This is what makes this cinephile biogram, which, apart from a few conversations, consists mainly of archive material and a wealth of intelligently selected and edited film clips, so special: Eugénie Grandval’s portrait recalls a time when cinema was bursting its bonds and anything seemed possible. Playing parts that were never repeated and yet followed an astonishingly consistent arc, Bulle Ogier not only became an icon of that period but something of a co-author of the directors she worked with, whether they were called Barbet Schroeder, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Marguerite Duras or Jacques Rivette. Rarely has a film about film sparked such an appetite for rediscovery.
Jessica Sarah Rinland visits zoological gardens across Argentina to craft a portrait not of a single institution, but rather its underlying concept: an observational, yet still ever-probing exploration of zoo itself. The different types of image and their textures she collects to this end—the silky 16mm that comprises the bulk of the film, the crisp surveillance footage, the grainy black-and-white cameras that capture creatures roving “undisturbed”, the yellowing photographs that pin down Indigenous people and animals alike – perfectly correspond to the varying perspectives she gathers on her subject: a place of imprisonment and colonial legacy, but now also one of everyday routine, conservation and even tenderness.
For all the ambivalence of its central theme, this is, like all of Rinland’s work, a film of extraordinary tactility: Human hands that clean, catalogue and caress, leathery trunks and furry fingers that reach between iron bars in search of comfort, plumage glistening in the sun. Jean Piaget coined the term collective monologue to refer to the developmental phase in which the child believes nature is created for them alone and can be controlled as such. It is so strangely moving to see control give way to care.
More than three quarters of the 650,000 inmates released from prison in the United States every year end up back behind bars within five years. Former drug dealer Coss wants to beat the statistics. After a long prison sentence, he returns to his family on New York’s Lower East Side in 2014, determined to build a legal existence for himself. Together with other former inmates, he opens a gym in his old neighbourhood which is rapidly being gentrified. If a guy like him can master this extreme challenge, can other ex-convicts do the same?
Filmmaker Debra Granik observed Coss’s efforts over a period of eight years. Through her camera, we experience frictions and obstacles, setbacks and successes, and learn what enormous stress it is to succeed against all odds in a racist environment that knows no mercy. Like a Bildungsroman – Granik explicitly refers to the social-realist literature of Charles Dickens –, the film is divided into chapters. The long form enables her to follow several narrative strands and focus on a variety of protagonists. This generates an increasing pull that soon makes us forget the time, lament every failure, and cheer every small victory.
Argentine director Agustina Pérez Rial’s debut feature-length film about the ninth edition of the International Film Festival in her native city of Mar del Plata from 1968 seems to find an uncommonly balanced solution to the primal dilemma of documentary storytelling. In an impressively brilliant montage of archive material, a story is constructed which, according to the director herself, is not necessarily true, but realistic.
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.
The herb dispute, in this case about ’Akkoub (gundelia) and Za’atar (wild thyme) is one of the more bizarre aspects of the Middle East conflict. These plants are much sought-after ingredients of Palestinian cuisine and have been collected for generations; for reasons of nature conservation, however, this is forbidden in the West Bank. Israeli park rangers thus find themselves in hot pursuit of their collectors for a fistful of greens. Jumana Manna humorously presents the poaching as civil disobedience.
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.
Surreal formations, stalactites, rocks moulded by water and poisonous bubbling. The images that turn into an exploration of her own soul for Paula Ďurinová seem like a dream landscape. Grief plays a key role – Ďurinová’s grandparents both died during the Covid pandemic. She looks for them between the gases and fumes, dives through a body of water that has ceased to exist but in whose cool freshness her grandfather once bathed his feet and across which she used to swim with her grandmother.
“Lapilli” works in an associative and abstract way. At the same time, the minerals recovered by Ďurinová have something very concrete about them: compressed, buckled and broken, sharp-edged, corroded or gently polished. At one point, the director compares herself to a stone detached from its rock, questioning and without orientation, drifting around: “I don’t feel the ground anymore.” “Lapilli” leaves no doubt that feelings of pain and helplessness can harbour greater strength, but also a very special poetry and beauty. The interplay with an organic experimental soundscape opens up an intimate, almost universal experience.
This new feature by American filmmaking legend Jem Cohen is like a strange cousin to his classic “Museum Hours,” another essay film given structure by fiction that swaps art for science and one time-honoured gallery in Vienna for a range of different institutions. Karl is an ageing Austrian astronomer and museum consultant. His wife Eleanor is a physicist based in the US, just like his young friend and colleague Sarah, a specialist in citizen science who is cautiously starting a new relationship. The three of them converse and hold forth on their respective specialities to mesmerisingly informative effect, but also keep returning to and interrogating the feelings that intertwine with their disciplines: politics and climate change, the uncertain future, solitude and intimacy – academic work as a pursuit for the melancholy.
Cohen’s camerawork shows them in frame, but also accompanies their voice-overs with his typical blissful digressions, wandering through museum corridors and exhibition spaces, fixing his gaze on heavenly bodies and scientific instruments, capturing city streets, oceans and landscapes, exploring and collecting with a curiosity equally studious and felt: tiny fragments, massive discoveries, stars at an infinite remove. Grasping the hugeness of the world might seem impossible, but it’s just about disentangling all the perspective: the big, the little and the far.
As a pioneer of Neo-Andean architecture, Freddy Mamani Silvestre attracts attention far beyond the borders of Bolivia. His non-conformist designs are influenced by the culture of the Aymara, the biggest ethnical group in the country, echoing their myths and patterns. Buildings constructed between 2008 and 2021 are circled, inspected and captured, in part 35 of the ongoing series “Photography and beyond”.
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.
If there is one person Matthew Lancit can’t get out of his mind, it is his uncle Harvey. Dark rings around his eyes, pale, blind, his legs amputated. Like Harvey, the filmmaker also suffers from diabetes. He has the disease under control, but one question is always nagging at him: How much longer? His long-term (self-)observation reliably revolves around fears of infirmity and mutilation. He translates the feared body horror into film, stages himself as a zombie, vampire, a desolate figure. Lancit playfully anticipates his potential decline, serving up a whole arsenal of effects which – as video recordings prove – go back to his youth. It is not for nothing that the “dead” in the title is also reminiscent of “dad.” Because “Play Dead!” also negotiates his own role as a father.
Lancit deeply involves his family in his fantasies, letting them become demons and lurch through the living room together. The documentation of his own diabetes also allows us a look at a modern Paris family life with two small children and a partner who usually plays along sympathetically with her husband’s carryings-on. Lancit’s approach deliberately transgresses borders, opens body, soul and front door. The result is a humorous and occasionally disturbing self-testimony.
Slaughterhouses with concrete blades on top, monumental cemetery gates in the plains: Architect Francisco Salamone (1897–1959) shaped the image of the Argentinean pampa around Buenos Aires. In part 34 of his “Photography and beyond” series, Heinz Emigholz once more probes architecture for biographical traces. Salamone, who immigrated from Sicily as a child, realised his ideas between 1936 and 1940, when Mussolini’s Italy re-discovered architecture as an ideological craft.
One film, two women, three rules: a one-year video correspondence, every three weeks and modelled on experimental female film artists. The two friends Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa begin their dialogue between São Paulo and Los Angeles in the upheavals of 2020 – in the midst of pandemics, election campaigns and anti-racist protests. In thoughtful, sometimes playful visual essays they also search for feminist cinematographic forms for the female body.
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.
