SFIFF 2012: A Short Preview and an Equestrian Digression

A relaxing evening at the Ohlsdorfers

If you've seen previous Tarr films you know them to be austere in montage, rich in mise-en-scène (more like Andrei Tarkovsky's or Alexander Sokurov's than James Benning's), often apocalyptic in tone. Though set in 1889, this film-imagined aftermath of a purported historical incident involving Nietzsche and the flaying of a horse, whose father-and-daughter proprietors eke a dirt-poor decrepit-farm-bound existence on nothing but potatoes, seems a mirror of our own apocalyptic times. A rare visiting neighbor outlines, in general terms, the rapacious human drive, greater than the natural one, to overrun, to conquer, to befoul: the earth, certainly, but also film, one can construe Tarr lamenting, his chosen medium disappearing increasingly rapidly from the public eye, ravaged by the scourge of "new media". Reports cite this as his last film, but I've found none that elaborates. I suppose he has heeded the death knell that reverberates within his work.

Tragically, The Turin Horse has been shown digitally in various engagements, a cinematic flaying I'm sure I'd find unendurable. Rumor has even circulated that SFFS is showing it so. Fear not--it's in a lovely 35mm print. Make haste.

This inability of many film artists to continue to work in film in our current cultural-technological climate is a tragedy of our times. Some (eg. Ernie Gehr, Fred Worden) have made interesting though vastly different video works. I've never been partial to the digital output of the Kuchars. Descriptions of Benning's post-film work, which I've not been tempted to sample, depict them as continuous with his later film work, save the absence of that reality-affirming medium that was, for me anyways, their sole point of interest. Nathaniel Dorsky, despite the loss of his preferred Kodachrome stock, seems devoted as ever to 16mm, but his less-screened partner and protégé Jerome Hiler

Jerry Hiler

seems to be, if not a convert, a casualty of conversion. His Words of Mercury, described as "a tribute and a farewell to the boundless glories of film imagery", despite being shot in 16mm and largely in-camera edited, and being shown in 16mm elsewhere, will premiere digitally at his hometown festival (to return to topic).

The actual films on offer in the festival may be perused here. (We'll keep the listings as current as possible through the inevitable amendments.) As ever, the 35mm is trending downwards, though I'm pleased to see a couple of 16mm shorts in the Blink of an Eye program, accompanying Hiler's video.

Only one press screening of a festival film was offered on 35mm this time around: Chilean Cristián Jiménez's Bonsái, which, as it turns out, was shot on video. As its protagonist bicycles through the background of one not so hi-res shot, an accompanying arrow is needed to draw to him our attention. This humorous intervention is perhaps the most medium-conscious the work gets. In making its hero a writer who inadvertently gains personal insights by perpetrating authorial lies, the self-referential movie suggests its own literary origin. A more coherent adaptation might have changed the writer to a filmmaker. (Who shoots on film, one would hope!) Like much South American cinema, this movie has a deadpan tone that makes it hard to take seriously the passion of a pivotal youthful affair. On the other hand, the excessive compositional frontalism often encountered in these films is kept on a leash, the SFIFF festival guide's illustrative still notwithstanding.

Edit: A correspondent informs me that Jerry Hiler's film was in fact shown in camera-original 16mm yesterday. Great news, and I look forward to seeing it tomorrow!