by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor
We’re coming to you live from the 64th New York Film Festival with the hottest ticket of the whole event: The Currents short film programs! Program #4 is cheekily subtitled “The Real World”, bringing to you four films with unique narrative and stylistic understanding to one very fair question: How many realities does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Especially at a moment in time where “reality” has become so easy to manufacture, and memories created and destroyed at a moment’s notice for no reason other than capitalist convenience, that’s an important question to ask, whether the goal is to speculate on the future or reclaim a past. There’s no easy answer, but the human creativity and inventiveness these directors bring show how rewarding it can be to wrestle with such topics...
CERTAINTIES, Calum Walter
Structured around video diaries and home security feeds, Certainties lets the irony of its title seep potently across the proceeding 15 minutes. As wildfires rage on in California, the question of how to survive is on everyone’s mind. Handheld footage of a person (presumably Walter) surveying their environment, burying small birds that presumably died due to the heat or taking ever-hotter temperature readings, accrue ceremonial qualities through repetition. The late-night conversations in and around a couple’s car parked in their driveway build their own resonance, especially once the car’s AC becomes the sole respite from scorching hot midnight air.
The flora and especially the fauna of California have a more immediate response. Footage of fully-grown bears cavorting around the neighborhood are endearing, especially when they’re trailed by cubs, but the overwhelming sense of an approaching inferno gives these images dire implications. They have nowhere else to go. What will happen to them as temperatures climb higher? Hell, what will happen to us? An orange tree’s ability to withstand the same conditions is the kind of iconography that threatens to become overwrought symbolism, but Walter’s economic and purposeful editing situates the tree as another living creature doing its best to survive. Certainties builds to an almost eerie conclusion, leaving us to wonder what the people in the film (and, therefore, all of us) can do to save themselves and the world around them.
RW-LO, Martine Syms
A huge tonal swerve from Certainties, as well as the lone film in this series to include any kind of narrative footage. RW-LO incorporates home movie footage and actor recreations to dramatize a chapter from the life of Syms’s longtime friend and collaborator Brent David Frenay. Back when he was a teenager in the Deep South, Brent had his first-ever diva obsession with Melissa Howard of The Real World: New Orleans, which soon involved his mother, grandmother, and preteen sister encouraging him to reach out to her. Brent makes her a necklace and attaches it to the fence of the Real World mansion she’s living at, hoping with all his heart that she responds.
My reflex instincts were to worry how far this young boy and his family would go in order to fulfill his obsession. This is a story template with a lot of room for some fucked-up events, and seeing this family armed with their own chunky camcorders outside the Real World gates doesn’t inspire a good sense of boundaries. Yet my fears proved unfounded. Syms’s sunny photography, and Brent’s awed admiration for Melissa’s unabashed authenticity point to a pop girlie’s idolization of a true baddie. Flashes of teen embarrassment - really the mortifying ordeal of sharing your interests with your mom - and the sister’s occasional bratty outbursts are enough to make RW-LO slightly less than a sugar-covered trip down memory lane. The recreation of several Melissa scenes from RW: New Orleans are as charismatic as the original footage. Melissa and Brent’s off-screen correspondence culminates in a family celebration so ebullient I briefly thought he’d been cast on the show. It’s a fun bit of nostalgic storytelling, and in form and tone, it surprised me more often than I expected.
PLACEHOLDER, Jesse McLean
What do you do when the person you imagined you’d spend the rest of your life with is no longer in the picture? That’s the question Jesse McLean’s unnamed protagonist asks herself as she navigates life following a very sudden divorce. Little context is given for the marriage itself, aside from references to alcohol bottles and who’s better at doing paperwork. Lockdown doesn’t help, if you can believe it. Soon the protagonist spends all of her time hunting down films starring a specific Swedish actor and imagining herself on a solo Antarctic expedition, her observations about her marriage ending inevitably informed by how there’s literally no one else for her to see and nothing else to do. “A year ago she couldn’t imagine not sleeping next to her husband, not waking up and seeing him every day. Now she doesn’t miss him.” Sure, but is that all we got going on, diva?
The monochromatic cinematography allows for a full spectrum of colors and saturations, while still capturing the kind of malaise that comes from multiple life-altering events hitting you at once. I love how the protagonist’s black snowsuit pops against the white glacier snow, an aesthetically satisfying image that succinctly distills the film’s study of escapism. The textured lensing and dreamy editing between different fascinations gives Placeholder a smeary sense of time passing. McLean isn’t dramatizing a blurring of fantasy and reality, but instead showing how easy it is to get pulled into escapist dreams when one has nothing else to do except get lost in your imagination.
MOON PALACE, Jiaqi Yu
The most formally challenging of these four films, and arguably the most intimate with its maker’s memories. Jiaqi Yu has pulled from years of family videotapes and photo albums, obfuscated by superimpositions and unusual distancing effects even as the scenarios being shown are instantly recognizable. A wedding photo loses specificity by covering the bride and groom’s faces in gold leaf. At several points we get to see home movies on an old TV while the camera is placed at the end of a dinner table, forcing us to really try and see any personalization in her family’s faces, even as the audio comes out just fine. Sometimes the moon herself speaks to us, as animated interstitials guide us from one scene to the next.
These different strategies make Moon Palace less of a treatise on its maker's memories than a study of memory itself, how childhood can be remembered as a moonlit patina with chutes and blockages that only make sense to you. The windows into different planes of movement from one sepia photograph is a genuinely shocking image. I’m blown away by Yu’s formal ingenuity, even as I’m glad not every film works this hard to keep me adrift from its core. It’s rare to see any artwork composed of such deeply personal archives that keeps those memories tantalizingly private, focusing instead on the negative space between those memories, and ensuring they become the real story.
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