Crossroads 2024
On four films showcased at SF Cinematheque's annual experimental film festival, Crossroads.
Seasonal Concerns (Maximilien Luc Proctor, 2024)
Seasonal Concerns breathes the crisp outdoor air of its environment. Stern statues overlap in a garden, appearing and disappearing as inhaling and exhaling. The film's editing is reminiscent of masters such as Nathaniel Dorsky or Sharon Couzin; the cuts pulse, concerned with creating the film's own bodily system and physical mode of function. The stone people look at each other through layers of film, get caught within each other's arms, touch, hold, and reach across celluloid. Acutely aware of the space in frame that these structures occupy, Maximilien Luc Proctor introduces a softness with a view of the rounded sun or rippling water. Blue and green-hued concrete and vegetation are woven between snow-dusted glares, stretching throughout time, when different seasons can be united and exist simultaneously. Portals open when layers of sky or light ascend or descend over shadowy branches or climbing leaves, the trees sometimes as stoic as the stone friends with which they share the garden.
emergence (Margaret Rorison, 2024)
The title emergence suggests the occurrence of two cicada broods (both the 13-year interval and 17-year interval cicadas) emerging simultaneously for the first time after 221 years during the summer of 2024 in Central Illinois. In Margaret Rorinson’s film, moments of summer—an older woman’s face, a committee of vultures, a flurry of gnats, reaching foliage, hands sifting through leaves—are framed against the peaceful whir of these two broods. Life amid its cycles and seasons is captured on sharp, seamlessly hand-developed 16mm film. Just as the presence of the cicadas is not overwhelming, so too is the presence of lounging, perched vultures not threatening. These hunched animals look tender when coupled with the smiling face of a woman who wears the years of life on her skin with a glow. The balance of all these living creatures coalesce in a delicate celebration of teeming life in all of its natural forms.
Feather Family (Alison Folland, 2023)
A child simulates their vulnerability through an online bird role-playing game, Feather Family. The game's title card appears in thick lettering, accented by a light feather caressing the Y, with a little cloud floating below it containing the text “Play.” Blocky Roblox graphics load slowly, and any movement of the fowls is glitchy. The little girl’s on-screen activities and interactions as different species of bird in this virtual bird world are paired with soft, actively read incantations and short meditations on loneliness and the physical. Even when seen wielding a googly-eyed toy broom, the child’s innocence is seemingly melted by the monitor and morphed into an unflinchingly honest depiction of what wounds can be carried in childhood and mirrored through tools for play. Words spoken and repeated mimic the chunky chicks and sharp-edged raptors on the recorded screen as an interpretation of life and modes of operating within it. As the film lingers, the phrases (always accompanied by the ping of Siri) become more violent and visceral (“kills,” “sinks,” “breaks a leg on one of the rocks”). In the form of a falcon, she dives to catch a pigeon. Repeatedly, her digital beak buries itself into the rigid, unmoving pigeon's body. The powerlessness of the bird girl in the real world transfigures into powerful offensive and defensive reactions as a predator in the computerized universe.
how to make magic (Blanca García, 2024)
Blanca García’s small, delicate worlds have always felt like a spell in and of themselves. The use of text, standard in her work, takes the form here of a 1974 children’s book titled How to Make Magic. Mystical words on pages (“love spells,” “cross my palm with silver”) are interlaced with natural imagery, creating a joyous sense of wonder about the earth. Playful contemplation of flares of light and cast shadows invoke a fantasy. The coziness of forestry summons the same comfort of a story adorned with talkative woodland animals or trees as camouflage for dwellings of sprites and spirits. The graceful movements—a pan over words cut to a pan over the forest floor, spinning in a circle, sunlight flickering as it leaks through the branches of trees—evoke awe at the capacity for humans to marvel at the beauty in simplicity. The camera feels alive, an extension of its handler, every shot captured feels like a breath. This film feels both lived and like an untouched relic unearthed; it is its ability to occupy these two zones of tenderness that join to create much of the soft curiosity.