25 Great Experimental Films of 2023 (Patreon)

As we say goodbye to a very difficult 2023, I wanted to look back at some of the experimental films and videos from this year that inspired, entertained, and challenged me in the course of my viewing. Some of these films I've written about, some multiple times. Others fell through the cracks as I dealt with other assignments. But all of them suggest ways forward for a "genre" (for lack of a better word) that is undergoing accelerated change in the digital era. If you haven't seen these works, do look out for them in 2024 -- a year I pray will offer less violence and a bit more hope.

Ashes by Name is Man (Ewelina Rosińska, Germany / Poland)

This is a film that is attempting something rather new, and as a result it took me a couple of viewings to really understand Rosińska's overall approach. In its broadest sense, Ashes by Name is Man is an expansive formalist study of the place of the Catholic Church in Poland, how it impresses itself upon the landscape and embodies its precepts in architecture. But it is also an observational portrait of an elderly couple, seen at home, walking in the woods, and in the final shot, peeling an apple. One speaks of "going to church," but one doesn't always consider how the church comes to you, how a life of habitual faith can moot distinctions between culture and personality. In its firm handheld cinematography and regard for light, Rosińska's film shows the possible influences of Robert Beavers and Ute Aurand. But where Beavers typically restricts himself to a small number of elements and organizes them into a fugue, or Aurand composes even her longer works out of brief, complete ideas, Rosińska seems to apply Peleshian's "distance montage" concept, creating relationships that tug at our mind's ability to fully perceive them. One of the year's most challenging works, and indeed one of the best.

Color Negative (Sara Sowell, U.S.)

Color Negative combines the worlds of structural film and celebutante culture as if doing so were the most natural thing in the world. And it works, because Sara Sowell takes the ostensible lessons of Snow and Sharits to heart. If we're meant to scrutinize the surface of the film, its light waves and its grain quality, then what difference does it make what "the image" is? The result is a formalist consideration of the Kardashian / Jenners, in particular the carbon footprint of their jet-setting lifestyle. After all, if Kim Kardashian is famous for being famous, and structural film is fully self-referential, then how do we tabulate the cost and expenditure of their circulation?

The Enlightenment (Stephanie Barber, U.S.)

"The Enlightenment, consists of a dialogue  between two bears, Yon and Payola. They both appear as pencil drawings on transparencies, moved around by visible hands. Their conversation  veers from the ontological — are they inside or outside, and how would one tell? — to the bitterly prosaic (“sometimes your stupid mouth makes  me want to backhand you”). Payola has been researching the Enlightenment, and wants to share her “epic text” with Yon. After shuffling through sheaves of papers with bizarre lists and numbers, the bears redefine enlightenment by giving the viewer a series  of shots in which lamps suddenly switch off, leaving the screen completely dark. Like so many of Barber’s best films, The Enlightenment foregoes the indicative mode, favoring the unstable syntax of modern poetry."

Gush (Fox Maxy, U.S.)

"To watch Gush is to hover on the periphery of a circle of absolute love and trust. We are invited for a little while to just honor this community, to bear witness to its vibrant, irrefutable existence.  And while Maxy’s filmic language avoids the typical tricks and techniques for suturing the viewer into the world onscreen — this is not  a film about flattering or seducing its spectator — it is also  profoundly welcoming."

Here & Elsewhere (Bram Ruiter, Netherlands)

One of the joys of 2023 was my belated discovery of Dutch filmmaker Bram Ruiter. HIs latest film, Here & Elsewhere, takes its structure from Borges' 1960 poet "Arte Poética," and we hear Borges reading the poem on the soundtrack. This sounds like a soothing intellectual enterprise, but be warned. Ruiter's film is an object of jagged beauty, adopting classical aesthetics -- water on skin, light through windows on walls, etc. -- in order to continually thwart expectation. In a way, Ruiter offers a compendium of image qualities and textures: grainy black and white, jewel-like Super 8, crisp digital frames, oil painting, even desktop windows. The undercurrent of Here & Elsewhere is one of establishment and disruption, in which Ruiter asks the eye to become accustomed to a particular set of optical characteristics and then scuttles the mood. Like other current makes such as Bruno Delgado Ramo and Ewelina Rosinska, Ruiter composes wholes out of fragments, but the pieces don't always fit so easily.

I Cannot Now Recall (Kersti Jan Werdal, U.S.)

"I Cannot Now Recall uses the anodyne environments of suburbia as a backdrop for young people presenting spoken texts, and the result is a bit like imaginary entr'actes from a Gus Van Sant film -- possibly Elephant, but more likely Paranoid Park.  This is a modular film composed of single-shot readings (or in some cases, dramatizations) of excerpts from Yvonne Rainer's journals. In each  case, Rainer describes a dream she had. As you might expect, Rainer's dreams are a surreal amalgam of aesthetic, sexual, and political themes, but this abstruse content is solidified  by Rainer's plainspoken prose."

If You Don't Watch the Way You Move (Kevin Jerome Everson, U.S.)

Each year Everson produces several films, most of them remarkable. This threatens to obscure the significance of his achievement, and his status as one of America's most important visual artists. We're starting to take Everson's excellence for granted, and this has to stop. In addition to his two historio-spatial studies of the decommissioned Ohio State Reformatory, Air Force Two and Boyd v. Denton, Everson produced this deceptively observational document of two hip-hop artists, Derek “Dripp” Whitfield Jr. and Taymond “ChoSkii” Hughes, laying down a new track called "Shiesty." In the middle of the session, we are suddenly treated to a performance of John Cage's 4'33, perhaps suggesting that the world belongs to the trap, and the rest is silence.

It follows It passes on (Erica Sheu, Taiwan / U.S.)

"It follows It passes on by Erica Sheu is a kind of abstract family breviary, offering fleeting images of small, fragmented objects. The film features a discontinuous text (spoken and printed) that draws from Sheu’s family history in Taiwan. Examples: “Father joked  about it. ‘We don’t need to hide from the bomb anymore.’” and ” I recall feeling guilty. My very first memory.”"

Laberint Sequences (Blake Williams, Canada)

"Laberint Sequences puts the viewer through their paces, taking a fairly simple idea — a  study of a manicured landscape — and introducing denser and denser layers of abstraction. From an homage to the late Michael Snow, and his panning film <—>, to a mechanically achieved birds-eye view, to an appropriation of relevant material from a piece of narrative cinema (“something horizontal,” we might say), and finally a performer subjecting that outside material to critical scrutiny, this film explores the many ways that a cultural landmark, usually subject to  the tourist’s gaze, can be intellectually reorganized through filmic intervention. "

Let's Talk (Simon Liu, Hong Kong)

"Liu provides a dissonant musique concrète soundtrack and tremulous, throbbing images of the actual population as well as dimly lit alleyways and food stands, the “secret” Hong Kong that locals know how to navigate. Let’s Talk alternates between unadulterated PRC propaganda and the real Hong Kong, with its fields of fugitive light and gesture. Liu’s connection to these places is palpable, and it’s often as though the celluloid can barely contain their energy."

Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan / U.S.)

"In most respects, this is a film about drawing. The sudden mandalas on a black screen represent the most essential cinematic mark-making, and Nishikawa’s halting rhythms recall the work of the late Luther Price. Light and sound, at their most elemental: Nishikawa’s film exemplifies  Wavelengths in more ways than one."

The Man Who Couldn't Miss Screenings (Damon Packard, U.S.)

"Packard has uploaded a whole batch of new films to his YouTube channel.  Although they are all quite different, they share a few key elements. For one thing, Packard is creating moving images using Artificial Intelligence programs. All the disturbing, uncanny-valley effects that  we find ourselves debating about AI creations -- the plasticky skin, the stereotyping and homogeneity of the human figures, the misplaced facial features or extra digits -- are all being actively employed by  Packard. The best of the lot, The Man Who Couldn't Miss Screenings, is a shrill  movie-nerd lament that turns the smelliest, most obsessive traits of the  urban cinephile into next-level pathology. "Comfortably Numb" plays in its entirety as a lumpy, balding film freak panics that he is "missing  all the screenings." ("It's 35mm! They haven't shown these films for fifty years!") On the one hand, the film's depiction of the nerds'  "Chinese wives" is unavoidably cartoonish and borderline racist. At the same time, the multiple iterations of "LA movie nerd" in the film (neck  beards, too-tight t-shirts, thick gut, gooners' stare) are just as stereotyped as the Asian women. Packard is in part showing just how impersonal, data-scraping AI systems see us, as indistinguishable from our image-culture."

Muted Bridges (Yan Wai Yin, Hong Kong)

"[Yan's] framing and organization coax us to look beyond the objects in the image, to consider history and politics as the negative space that cannot be directly visualized. Before the democracy protests, these rather nondescript bridges were probably not thought about very much.  They are conduits, not destinations. And yet, Muted Bridges suggests that they have a very different social meaning now, as emblems of the eradication of public discourse and, to a tragic extent, the  people who stood against Mainland tyranny."

NYC RGB (Viktoria Schmid, Austria / U.S.)

In art as in science, the simplest solutions are often the most elegant. In NYC RBG, Schmid separates red, green, and blue into separate image tracks, slightly staggering them upon reprinting, so that her patient, poetic New York city symphony becomes prismatically striated, with an unanticipated result. 2022 Manhattan looks very much like our visual records of the 40s and 50s, when we saw the world in Technicolor. NYC RGB displays echoes of Ernie Gehr and Jim Jennings -- given the subject, how could it not? -- but the clean graphic presentation is Schmid's alone.

Sea of Glass (Francisco Rojas, Chile)

One of my very favorite films of the year, Sea of Glass also represents my biggest regret. I wanted to program Rojas' film in my annual experimental program in Houston. Maintaining audience goodwill is always a delicate balance, and I didn't feel I could pull the trigger on a 25-minute long, silent film composed entirely of light reflecting on water. But cowardice never gets us anywhere, and in retrospect, the sheer power of Rojas' film would have served as its own defense. It is true that Sea of Glass recalls certain of Brakhage's masterworks, such as the Vancouver Island films and The Text of Light. So Rojas' film may strike some as too familiar. But then again, we all knew what Bach sounded like before Glenn Gould played him. The editing and rhythm of Sea of Glass are simply breathtaking, as Rojas produces micro-events of shape, direction, and velocity. It is a film that should be seen on the big screen, and so if any programmers are reading this, I hope you'll be braver than me.

Shrooms (Jorge Jácome, Portugal)

"We see mushroom forager Dan Padrino attaching small packets of shrooms to the legs of carrier  pigeons, which he then sends off to deliver their payload to his customers. As we watch their lines of flight, the pigeons offer a glimpse of the expansive trips the mushrooms deliver. But wait. How does the pigeon know which balcony is the one for the apartment of a  particular customer? I mean, these birds are smart, but they aren’t UPS."

Slow Shift (Shambhavi Kaul, India / U.S.)

"Centuries ago, people fashioned these rocks into cultural forms which are now in disarray; the towering, rounded stones display far more stability in their untouched state. These stately boulders resemble Magritte paintings in the real world, and the entire array is occupied by dozens of frisky langurs, scrabbling up the rocks and waving their tails in the air like they just don’t care. With its playful rockslides engineered by the artist to look like payouts from slot machines, Slow Shift might best be described as Darwinian slapstick."

Spark From a Falling Star (Ross Meckfessel, U.S.)

Often when people are struggling to describe an experimental film, they use the word "dreamlike," if only because it immediately conveys confusion. But Ross Meckfessel is one of a handful of filmmakers whose works are genuinely oneiric. Like our dreams, his work holds the promise of narrative meaning tantalizingly out of reach, and we are left with potent but often indescribable impressions of a universe that resembles our own but refuses to conform to logic. Spark From a Falling Star is a dazzling film that, more than anything else I've seen thus far, resonates with the vague dread and dislocation so many of us feel about the world around us. Is ecological doom around the corner? Are we on the cusp of totalitarianism? Everything is on the verge of coming apart, but what forces will put the shards back together? Meckfessel depicts the breakdown of personal identity and the totems of civilization, and we see them replaced almost instantly with the grand, antiseptic schemes of unseen designer. We cannot find our way through this maze, but we know that our dislocation is part of a larger plan. Incidentally, anyone who appreciated the gravity-suspending atmosphere of Skinamarink should seek out Spark From a Falling Star, a film that plays in the mind like the parts of a nightmare we forgot upon waking.

Spoils (Luciana Decker Orozco, U.S. / Bolivia)

Decker's film may not be a deliberate homage to the great Rose Lowder, but Spoils adopts Lowder's high-speed, frame-by-frame treatment of landscape and motion, turning it to somewhat different ends. Where Lowder discovers painterly beauty in the French countryside, Decker shows us the margins of civilization, wooded areas close enough to roads and buildings to accumulate litter. This sets the tone for what eventually becomes a consideration of very different "spoils," the artworks and artifacts stolen through Western colonialism. These wonders are intercut with shots of half-eaten food, as someone scrapes the remains of taco salad off plates and into the garbage. The different strands in Decker's film don't hang together, nor should they. Spoils is a critical document from a culture practically addicted to waste.

Stained Night (Andrés Medina, Argentina)

Sort of a distant cousin to Ben Russell's Black and White Trypps Number Three, Stained Night uses footage from an outdoor concert as its primary canvas. Medina chooses to make his film silent, which at first seems counterintuitive until we realize that in this case, the music is merely an occasion for a complex play of light and darkness, A repeated motif is a bright pair of circular lights, which at times resemble car headlights but also stare back at us like glowing eyes. Medina combines filmic textures with aggressively digital elements, the degradation of the image resolving into bright pixelated skeins. Conceptually, Stained Night comes together when we see concertgoers recording the show with their iPhones. In the age of absolute mediation, what does a "live event" even mean?

Sundown (Steve Reinke, U.S. / Canada)

Steve Reinke could be the Spalding Gray of our era: discursive, erudite, happy to follow a train of thought to the end of the line, even if the result is a messy derailment. In Sundown, Reinke reflects on a series of photos of rocks he took while in Vienna for an exhibition. As if to demonstrate his brazen lack of concern for narrative consistency, Reinke ends Sundown by claiming to have exhausted his sound/image archive, with only two bits of material left. In discussing whether he may be the "queer Nietzsche," Reinke underlines his devout Deleuzianism. Sundown makes no distinction between art and nature, organic or inorganic material, and eventually ends with Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown" playing over a bed of seaweed. The song, which Reinke describes as being "about a horny alcoholic in Northern Ontario," is an object, despite its clear origin in human desire. Now Lightfoot is gone ("about time," Reinke jokes), an energy form breaking down, getting to work forming the rocks that may preoccupy another artist millions of years from now.

Sunflower Siege Engine (Sky Hopinka, U.S.)

Although it was his film and video work that first gained Sky Hopinka widespread attention as an artist, he is also a musician and a poet. Many of Hopinka's films incorporate spoken or written text, but I think Sunflower Siege Engine is his first film where the images and sounds are chiefly driven by the poetry. The film combines portions of different writings by Hopinka, visceral but oblique in their discussion of physical anxiety and emotional longing. These words are combined with Hopinka's signature treatment of sky and landscape, with primary color fields extracting painterly value from the environment. Sunflower Siege Engine also has room to include archival footage of the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island, and a follow-the-bouncing-ball lyric video for Room Thirteen's song "Tidal Wave." In the end, Hopinka offers a heartfelt but ambivalent message of survival: "there's no time for death songs, we don't remember them anymore anyhow."

Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: 'Phony Wars' (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland / France)

"Phony Wars was intended to be Godard’s adaptation of the 1937 novel False Passports by Belgian writer Charles Plisnier. As Godard mentions twice, Plisnier was a Trotskyite who was thrown out of the Communist Party. He was a  Catholic, and an anti-Stalinist Marxist. In other words, he occupied  simultaneous, incompatible beliefs, and so strictly speaking, Plisnier’s ideology does not exist. Godard described Plisnier’s writing as visual art, more focused on portraiture than plot. Plisnier was a storyteller without stories, a painter without a brush. Across the running time of the trailer, Godard presents us with fragments, shards of a work that cannot cohere. There’s a relationship between this material and Godard’s Scenario videos, in that the trailer shows us the work of thought, the work behind the work. But in this case, the work is not there."

Trouble (Miranda Pinnell, U.K.)

"Trouble articulates how the thievery of the archaeologists, as well as the destruction of towns by bombardment, are processed in the British cultural imaginary. The “mummy’s curse” became a predominant myth in the ‘40s and ‘50s, a sort of triangulation of national guilt through Orientalist superstition. Pennell considers the fate of the Earl of Carnarvon, who paid for the excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun, as well as the seemingly neutral investigations of aerial archaeologist  O.G.S. Crawford, whose archives in the British Museum she reconstructs into a coherent map of the region, one that covers the walls of her  apartment."

We Don't Talk Like We Used To (Joshua Gen Solondz, U.S.)

"Throughout much of the rest of We Don’t Talk, Solondz toggles between distorted footage inside the home and material shot while moving out in the world. This concern with the body under duress, and the comprehensive breakdown of domesticity and public life, takes on a more direct valence in this film because, in a sense, the air is quite different in the COVID era. One tried to protect oneself and one’s family by wearing protective gear outside, keeping the body to itself, because one has no idea where the toxicity lay. Are you infecting the outside world, or does it threaten to infect you?"