EVENTIDE (Sharon Lockhart, 2022) (Patreon)

Movement creates instability. This is a basic tenet of cinema, and it's true no matter how elegantly that movement is orchestrated. A still image allows us to grasp it fully, to see how its parts interact and form a coherent whole. Once the image starts moving, it becomes impossible to ever really see that whole, not just because it's changing, but because movement inevitably pulls our focus away from the totality. It pulls our focus toward the details.

EVENTIDE, the new experimental featurette from Sharon Lockhart, displays this formal premise with remarkable simplicity. The opening image of this film -- the camera never moves -- shows a coastal landscape near dusk. We see a body of water surrounded by land, in the foreground and in the distance. A small hill of rock and some plant life anchor the foreground on the lower right, and the entire top half of the composition is devoted to the sky. In its painterly play of flatness and implied depth, Lockhart's image resembles a Cézanne.

As night begins to fall, a group of people enter the frame, first one, then another; eventually there are as many as five figures in the frame. They all have flashlights, and point them down at the ground, partly as an investigation of the environment, but mostly to light their way so they don't fall. Aside from the stippled green presence of illuminated foliage, these beams of light mostly just traverse the frame, slowly describing human action.

These movements, these lights, dominate the frame more and more once the sun is completely down and the coastline is enveloped in inky black. We see the stars come out and twinkle rather aggressively. Lockhart's sky often seems like a planetarium projection, strangely clear and bright. But our eyes mostly follow the people on the shore, making their own earthbound "stars" inside the frame. It's only after a few odd disruptions -- was there a projection problem just then? -- that we realize Lockhart is showing us a partial meteor shower.

A lot of Lockhart's previous work has applied duration and the static gaze to provide an intensive gaze, combined with a somewhat distanced, even anthropological attitude to profilmic events. Teenaged girls performing exercises, the reactions of an opera audience, workers in a factory -- Lockhart brings us closer to their experience without exactly implying intimacy. EVENTIDE is different. The performers are her friends, and they represent not some abstract principle but an all-too-human tendency. Whether we're walking on the shore at night, or sitting in a darkened theater, it's hard to look to the stars when we're busy keeping our feet on the ground.