Issue 7: Summer 2011
Experimental Film Club: Julius Ziz & James Benning
'The Window, The Wolf and The Pig: Films by Julius Ziz' (IFI, Dublin, March 24th)
'The Train, The Cinema' (IFI, Dublin, January 19th)
Dublin's Experimental Film Club has provided the city with a regular showcase for experimental cinema since 2008. Its first two programmes of 2011 were both strong ones. Lithuanian-born Julius Ziz, having spent many years in New York, is currently based in Co.Clare. He was on hand in March to present three of his works, selected by regular EFC programmer Alan Lambert. These were The Window (1989), his first film; Et le cochon fut ne (And The Pig Was Born, 2000), his most famous; and The Wolf (2008).
If The Pig Was Born was the highlight of the screening, The Window also proved hugely impressive. This portrait of the director's grandmother, living in a remote rural village, is a stark film-poem that uses documentary-type images rendered oneiric through an alienated perception that may or may not belong to the inscrutable old lady. Such powerful effects as a boisterous party shown without sound, or images like a close-up of the grandmother sitting in front of a window outside which, as a passing detail, a boy in angel wings 'flies' by on a bicycle, create an unnervingly disorienting sense of distance. Does the silence of the party imply that she is blocking it out, withdrawing from it as a defence against her claustrophobic surroundings? Or is she simply existing on another level of consciousness? And the shot of the boy fluttering past the window, one worthy of Pasolini at his most astonishing, is equally ambiguous. The grandmother remains facing the camera, looking into the dark house, not noticing him. The lightness of youth passing unnoticed by the introversion of old age? Or, rather than not noticing the boy, is the grandmother actually generating his image- one of flight, grace and mortal transition? There are no stated answers, as this film hovers unsettlingly above its all too solid and realistic images of a melancholy rural existence.
The Pig Was Born similarly 'dreams' concrete images, but this time in the form of found footage. In fact, this great film was assembled in just one night from the diverse wealth of material deposited over the years in New York's Anthology Film Archives. Truly 'stream of consciousness' filmmaking, it creates unease but, equally, possesses an uncannily soothing quality that allows its disturbing nature to get under the skin in an insidiously effective way. Jonas Mekas contrasts it ("a poem") with Godard's Origins of the 21st Century ("a poster"), released the same year and also dealing with the grim legacy of the 20th century. The contrast between the resonances each filmmaker finds in the use of pre-existing images is, indeed, instructive. Godard, in his memorably gruelling short, brings us back to the historical fact underpinning his images and the perennial Godardian preoccupation with an image's adequacy in relation to history. In Ziz, the residue of moving imagery left behind by the 20th century seems to have unslipped its specificity and taken on an afterlife of its own. Ziz's ghosts are nameless.
The Wolf was the most narrative film in the programme, although its story is fragmented and often subordinated to sensory impressions. Its feverish vision of a man being hunted to death through vividly rendered natural settings, and becoming increasingly animalistic in the process, makes it an intriguing precursor to Skolimowski's recent success, Essential Killing (2010).
The January Experimental Film Club programme was guest curated by Killruddery Film Festival director Daniel Fitzpatrick and focused on trains in experimental film. Trains in cinema is an area of expertise for Fitzpatrick and his introduction to the screening was very good. The accompanying essay he wrote is well worth a read. The programme opened with Geoffrey Jones' short Snow (1967). Although a famously nifty exercise in montage, its lockstep sound-image rhythms soon grated on this writer who seemed a lot less impressed by its tedious assurance than most viewers. The assurance of the featured work, however, was truly breathtaking. James Benning's typically minimal, two-hour plus masterpiece RR (2007) comprises over forty shots of trains passing through landscapes. The magnitude of this film seems almost a challenge to ideas outside its main formal gesture. We can sit and contemplate the impact of the railroad on American history and maybe this is part of the filmmaker's intention... But can we do so for the entire length of the film? Can we do so in spite of the increasingly entrancing geometry of the trains' movement, as framed by Benning? His cinema is so elementally concerned with the present moment that it brings the viewer back to the first principles of cinema with a force almost unparalleled in contemporary film. It is concrete to the point of abstraction. And the beauty of that abstraction, here envisaged as mechanical trajectories that have somehow divested themselves of their human initiators, is the perhaps dangerous beauty of cinema's still under-acknowledged capacity to create alien worlds simply by gazing at reality... Far more than in any CGI generated Hollywood blockbuster, it is in Benning's film that we can see cinema well and truly colonising reality and creating a new world from it.
-Maximilian Le Cain