Ridge (John Skoog)

Swedish filmmaker John Skoog’s debut is set in his native Skåne County in the south of the country. Ridge revolves around a dairy farm in the countryside, but doesn’t follow a familiar narrative line. What we get is a mosaic of scenes from the vicinity of the farm involving men, animals and machines in isolation or in interaction: foreign workers from Poland arriving by ferry to the farm, a local supervisor walking them through the routines, harvest machines working on the fields, cows being milked by robots, residents collecting snails at night with flashlights, a migrant worker writing a musical greeting card to someone back home, two children playing a farm simulator game, a largely mute girl corralling cows that have broken free, a flea market suggested through a tracking shot of a stall with objects, fully costumed hunters entering cane fields, a cat in the house being thrown out, a picnic of young people in which one passes out, a machine cutting trees all alone in the dark, a burning car, a disco party and so on. There are a handful of protagonists that emerge, characters and locations that appear in multiple scenes, but there’s no sense of progress or causality across them. These documentary shards of information are, instead, loosely held together by the sensation of northern midsummer and the generally upbeat and mischievous feeling that goes with it.

Skoog, consequently, emphasizes the ambience. His smooth tracking shots glide over fields and pastures at golden hour. His meticulous sound design, which regularly drowns out human voice, mixes electronic music, machine drones and natural sounds. Despite not being about individuals or even humans per se, Skoog’s work with actors is noteworthy. An improvised scene with a Polish youth receiving a haircut becomes an impromptu lesson on immigrant behaviour and cultural differences, which then turns into a bullying session. The film opens with a voiceover recounting the legend of two cows that go wild; the two cows will make their appearance at the end. The work thus blends personal experience, folklore, fictional and documentary passages without favouring any of them. To some extent, Ridge recalls Koyaanisqatsi in its weaving of human, mechanical, animal and natural presences into a larger tapestry of life in a particular region. But Skoog’s film is vehemently anti-didactic, refuses as it does even the basic enticements of a narrative. On the other hand, it’s a work full of surface pleasures, especially Zbroniec-Zajt’s twilight cinematography. The result is a beguiling if befuddling portrait of migrant experience in the vein of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (Jessica Sarah Rinland)

Jessica Rinland’s unusually titled film (and unusually presented in two aspect ratios, 1.33 and 1.85) is also an unusual museum documentary. It begins with an on-screen text that muses on the relation of a replica to the original, tracing the parentage of painted animals to real animals, which themselves are DNA replicas of original specimen. The film opens with a replica too. A researcher-curator has a replica produced of an elephant tusk. She unpacks it carefully from its container, sucking out the flour-like powder protecting it. We will remain with this replica for a large part of the film, as the curator cleans it, has it broken with a hammer for an unspecified reason and glues back the broken pieces again for an unknown reason. Interspersed between these actions are other allied activities at the museum restoration section. What makes Rinland’s film go against the grain is that it refuses to give any context for the actions we witness. The activities we see are, in fact, undertakings at different museums across the world, but we don’t know that until the final credits. We assume that it’s the same cast replica of the ivory being processed, but we are in fact observing several artefacts, real and replicas. This destabilizing erasure of the boundary between real and fake also makes the viewer suspicious of the film’s apparently documentary nature.

Rinland is no Frederick Wiseman, her interest is not in the politics of art objects and institutions. If her patient observation of restoration activity recalls Harun Farocki’s work, the patently anti-explanatory bent of her film couldn’t be more different. Unlike traditional museum documentaries, Those That Resemble provides no supplementary information, no detail on the nature or history of the artefacts, the institutions sheltering and handling them. Rinland’s camera is relentlessly trained on hands performing a range of tasks: brushing casts, turning book pages, kneading dough to secure the casts, removing layers of packing material, chipping stones, drawing graphs and measurements, fixing ivory-lined boxes, cutting sponge into blocks that are then used to prime a tusk, laser cleaning a piece of ivory and so on. These activities take on a hypnotic quality in their zen-like focus on objective-bound activities; they are also very pleasurable to the obsessive-compulsive part of the brain trying to complete patterns. Large stretches of the film unfold like unbox therapy or five-minute craft videos, underscoring the care and precision with which the artefacts are handled. Recalling the cinematography of Claire Denis and Claire Mathon, Rinland’s camera exhibits a curious material fetish, fixated as it is on various textures natural and artificial. I was also reminded of Mani Kaul’s Mind of Clay at many points.

America (Garrett Bradley)

America opens with one of its many references that go over my head: a photo of black entertainer Bert Williams, who becomes a springboard for the film’s critical reflection on the visual history of black performers and entertainers. Stills and extracts from silent films featuring Afro-American actors are excerpted over ambient noise from the present. This archival material is intertwined with fictional passages shot in strongly monochrome 35mm: a black woman in post-Civil war South walks by cane fields and strips a white man wrapped in a long white cloth. The cloth flies over the field, becomes a plaything for a group of kids. It’s then trampled over by a unit of black Union cavalrymen, before being appropriated by them as a flag. The film’s dreamlike central section features even more disconnected vignettes: a boy scout group from Louisiana two of whose members play with telephone cables, a baptism filmed in split compositions, a table fan in the open, rotating doors, women skating, a couple dancing, disco lights, a knife falling and men with musical instruments staring at the camera. These seemingly unrelated glimpses of 20th century (Louisianian?) black experience, however, converge as the focus shifts to professional entertainment.

Louisiana-based Bradley, it appears, is interrogating the history of black representation as consumed and internalized by black viewers. Clips from silent films show Afro-American performers in exaggerated blackface caricaturing black life for a predominantly white audience, whether they are bumbling in a barroom dance or romancing on a merry-go-round. Bradley provides corrective recreations in the present, black performers executing graceful movements, gestures and actions in their respective fields. Bradley’s telescoped look at the history of black representation is sometimes quotational, as with the familiar image of athletes and baseball players, and sometimes revisionist, like as when we see an Afro-American orchestra conductor or a female aviator—images of black cultural contribution we aren’t regularly exposed to. The schema becomes apparent in a scene, filmed in tracking shots and canted angles, which recreates the Last Supper with black Jesus and apostles. The performers striking tableaux in America, in contrast to their predecessors, are black entertainers playing as and for themselves. In its exploration of the place of black figures in popular visual culture, America is a companion work to Ja’Tovia M. Gary’s The Giverny Document, in which the marked absence of black bodies in the Western artistic canon is juxtaposed with the safety of black women in public spaces. If less ambitious or polemical, Bradley’s film is more attuned to cinema history and, with its baroque compositions, superpositions and sharp chiaroscuro images, is also formally alive.

Present.Perfect. (Shengze Zhu)

Present.Perfect. is about China’s live streaming craze, which witnessed a regular user base of 422 million in 2017. To explore this phenomenon, Zhu has reportedly sifted through 800 hours of streamed footage and fashioned a film of two hours. The first section of her film is democratic and presents a mosaic of video clips. The selection predominantly consists of uniformly young men and women in blue collar jobs telecasting their everyday routine: wrecking buildings, transporting bags, running a pig farm, cutting trees, welding, digging ditches, and so on. One host offers “agritainment” to “rich city folks” through his organic farming sessions. Curiously resembling regular, festival-level contemplative cinema, this genre of streaming transforms boring jobs into spectacles enjoyed by people around the country. And Zhu’s non-hierarchical assembly of these clips offers something akin to the crowdsourced documentary Life in a Day, the cumulation of several idiosyncratic users functioning as a kind of collective portrait of young China. What we perceive is an entire country entertaining and being entertained by each other, a massive service economy masquerading as entertainment industry. As one host puts it, while streaming a cockroach carcass being raided by ants, “I’ll talk about whatever you want to hear”.

While this process of constantly turning private life into a public spectacle might appear worrisome, we see liberative strands emerge. In this snapshot of how a nation looks at itself, we observe how individuals, especially the most disenfranchised, build a self-image. Queer users and sex workers seem to have found a relatively safe space to express their voice or ply their trade. The terminally lonely find community, the terminally bored get entertainment, and those anonymized by assembly line work recuperate a sense of individuality through their devoted viewership: shooting with a selfie camera, they literally position themselves at the centre of a world that otherwise consigns them to the margins. In the longish title card, we are told about the popularity of the medium, but also the government’s measures to shut down channels telecasting unlawful content, such as violence and self-harm. This dialectic between private aspiration and state control, however, vanishes when the film abandons its sampling approach to focus on five particular hosts: a burn survivor who preaches against god, a single mother working at a undergarment factory, a street dancer with an awkward style, a mendicant with severely disfigured limbs and a factory worker suffering from a sexual maturity disorder which makes him look like a boy. The interest wanes—and the insight vanishes—as the film devolves into a freak show of sorts. On the other hand, as the film’s witty title indicates, Present.Perfect. demonstrates that live streaming profoundly transforms the nature of cinema as we understand it. The ‘cinema of the past’, based on recording reality and later transmitting it, makes way for a cinema in the present, viewed at the same time it’s made. The real-time exchange facilitated by the platform paradoxically takes cinema closer to its origins, turning it into a kind of low-grade, interactive vaudeville. How long before the corporates jump in?