treywillwest

Margaret Honda's "Color Correction" is a fascinating example of cinema as found object. There is a Duchampian aspect to this work, minus the self-congratulatory absurdism generally associated with dada.

A color correction print was, in the days prior to digital projection, somewhat like the unseen underbelly of a conventional film. It would be projected along with the film, underneath it, to provide a saturation of a particular color deemed insufficiently represented in a particular scene of the film. In an after-screening discussion, Honda explained that she requested the color correction print from a studio of a mainstream movie made between 2000 and 2013. She did not want to know what film the correction print that was provided had been meant to accompany. Honda then printed the correction print and offered it as her actual film.

The result is a feature length work consisting of nothing but changing patches of one color or another taking up the whole screen. The predominant color of a scene in a film of course reflects the narrative tone of that scene. "Color Correction" thus reveals the narrative rhythms of a Hollywood film without offering any such narrative or even any embodied object.

Watching the entire film was a unique experience to say the least. I found it profoundly meditative, studying the ways my mind wondered almost as if they were happening on screen. It also made the medium, the material-less projection of light, seem objective and sculptural. The colors became subjects of extended contemplation and even arbitrary aspects of the print we were watching- its dirt and scratches, seemed to take on a life of their own as their traces flickered across the screen.

Predictably, many audience members left before the film was finished. However, the majority stayed until the end and seemed enthusiastic about the experience and eager to engage with Honda about the work. It was an unconventionally stimulating evening.

David Cronenberg has done a great favor to those of us who try to write about his new film, "The Shrouds". Critics often make half-baked presumptions about the relations between an artist's work and their life, which most often are denied by the artist. Cronenberg, however, has prominently asserted that, yes, this tale of a person's macabre way of mourning their dead spouse is a response to the death of the writer-director's wife and that "The Shrouds" is the closest Cronenberg has offered to an autobiographical film, or at least a kind of cinematic self-portrait. It is surprising, then, that this is one of the octogenarian filmmaker's most irreverent works, one might even say his first comedy.

"The Shrouds" is a work fueled by disgust- at the state of the world, the pain of loss, even the self and its artistic practice. Those who dislike the film- and most will- might say that Cronenberg's art has deteriorated to the point of self-parody. I think the film constitutes intentional self-parody, a pasquinade of everything Cronenberg is experiencing in old age. The viewer has the uncomfortable feeling that Cronenberg is mocking his own grief, and that might be exactly what he's trying to do.

If "The Shrouds" is irreverent, it is also more immediately directed at our historical reality than other of the filmmaker's works. It might be said to being the closest this director has ever come to the openly political. One of the less discussed aspect's of this oeuvre is its geographic, almost caligrographic dimension. Cronenberg movies are filled with allusions to fantastical locations, some literal, some metaphysical or spiritual. Few filmmakers are as consistent in ending their works with the sense of a completed journey, even if this is a journey to an inevitable destination, like the choreographed transformation from pupa to insect.

Here the geographic allusions are to real places on our planet- specific sites in Iceland, Romania and its primary setting, Toronto. These are all sites of potential burials. The location and storage of corpses is central in this story. It is as if the site of a corpse has become the only proof of life, death the only site of the real. There are many illusions to all too realistic social media data that has come to categorize and "frame" our lives, our selves. If life has become this set of immortal, digitized "facts" then does death really come in our world, and if there is no death, then is there still really life?

Another reoccurring theme in the director's work is of unfathomably complicated and sinister conspiracies concocted by incomprehensible conspirators. The supposed conspirators here are recognizable and realistic: the governments of China and Russia, as well as realistically depicted right and left wing fundamentalists. But the conspiracies here are not causes for wonder but bemused disappointment- like our "Russia-gates" and TikTok panics they are thin excuses for a reality that doesn't deserve to be legitimate but has become so.

Cronenberg has lost his wife and will soon enough lose his life. He has strongly suggested that this will be his last film. He is leaving us with a depiction of exhaustion and disappointment but one that is, I think, a not unbeautiful depiction of negativity.

I saw a selection of Narcisa Hirsch's experimental shorts as part of the Academy Museum's series "Available Space". Some of them impressed me greatly, others tried my patience. This is just as it should be with "experimental" cinema. Hirsch's work deals with disembodiment and fragmentation both thematically and aesthetically. Her films pit body and voice, rhythm and cacophony against each other, making a coherent subject almost impossible to find in her work.

The film that impressed me most of all was the longest, the twenty minute-ish "Bach Surely Closed the Door When He Wanted to Work". A series of extended close-ups of several women are presented without dialogic sound. The voices of the women are heard, however, as they comment about the silent close-ups of themselves after the filming. Self becomes object, and standard psychic temporalities are disrupted. As academic as the exercise may sound, the effect of the work is not unemotional. Indeed, I found it moving.

Another highlight was "Rafael, August 1984". Composed of Super-8 images recorded by Hirsch during a trip to Patagonia with her titular lover, it includes a haunting voice-over addressed to the since estranged Rafael. This truly is cinema-as-love-poetry, to a degree that seems to me unprecedented.

Other works I, y'know, "admired" more than enjoyed. "Aida" is a frenzied dance-film that atomizes the dancers body-parts through jagged montage to which music different from what is being danced to is played. It's aesthetically pleasing enough, for a few seconds. Then it starts to seem repetitious and dizzying at the same time.

The final film shown, "Come Out" is a single Michael Snow-esque extreme close-up that comes slowly, so slowly, into focus. It is set to Steve Reich's sound-art piece of the same title which features the voice of Daniel Hamm, a Black man wrongfully accused of murder in New York, 1964. Reich loops Hamm's voice ad nauseam, until it becomes a kind of atonal "music". The piece is basically torturous to sit-through, but them again it's supposed to be.