by Dan Ziegler
I went into Light Field 2025, an all-celluloid film festival collectively run by artists, hoping I’d see some great films, and avoid some of the frequent misgivings in experimental film festivals: the dreaded archival film with ominous droning sounds, a general lack of attention to sound, etc. My stake in the cinema viewership is tied to my perspective as a filmmaker; bringing form to the fore, which admittedly leads to the occasional reductive judgement of works. What I found in my critical approach by the end of the festival instead was a dispersal of my preconceived wants and an expanded scope on how I view the relationship between films, filmmakers, programmers, and viewers. The seven idiosyncratic programs, all curated individually (except one) by Samuel Breslin, Zachary Epcar, Trisha Low, tooth, Syd Staiti, and Patricia Ledesma Villon, produce kaleidoscopic effects which, outside of the films themselves, foster the feeling of cinema as an organism, a process. There would be no cinema if not for its varying communities throughout history and all over the world; a fact ever-demeaned by the siloing nature of living today.
Palestine Will Win is the most pressing inclusion of the festival’s general avowal toward collective vitality. A 1969 film by Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and possibly the first anti-zionist film made by someone not of Palestinian origin, it covers the development of Palestinian resistance back to its formations against the British, but especially after the 1968 Battle of Karameh. Through still imagery of the resistance and their struggles, along with voiceover testimony from Palestinians, the film succeeds in its mission to create an intelligent and invigorating propaganda film meant to educate activist committees in the west and around the world. Thought to be lost since 1972, two prints were recently unearthed simultaneously at the Prelinger Archives in Berkeley and Third World Newsreel in New York City. The print viewed at Light Field came to programmer tooth after a comrade working at Prelinger reached out because of his work on the Palestine Film Index, an ever-expanding collection of Palestinian films, texts, and audio recordings gathered in response to the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and the cultural struggle in which their stories have been consistently silenced. These various endeavors aligned to bring this film back to life: the screening at Light Field is believed to be the first time it has been projected since its rediscovery. In tooth’s words, speaking about the Palestine Film Index, “The century long war against Palestinians by the zionist project is one waged not only militarily but also culturally. The act of filmmaking, preservation, and distribution becomes an act against this attempted cultural erasure of ethnic cleansing. The power inherent in this form as a weapon against this genocidal project of zionism is evidenced in the ways it has been historically & currently targeted by the occupation forces: from the looting & stealing of the Palestine Cinema Institute archives during the siege of Beirut in 1982, through the long history of targeted assassinations of Palestinian filmmakers, journalists, artists, & writers (from PFU founder Hani Jawharieh, to Ghassan Kanafani, Shireen Abu Akleh, Refaat Alareer, and over 100 journalists killed in the currently ongoing war on Gaza).”
While Palestine Will Win stands out by the weight of its historical significance, films that deal with disappearances abound in tooth’s program, such as Holographic Will by Mike Stoltz, which sends his soon-to-be-sold rent-controlled Los Angeles apartment flickering through a turbine, creating dizzying and unnatural transformations of his living room. If themes of disappearance recorded on film necessarily become themes of remembrance, I think of Samual Breslin’s program, which he dedicated to Eli Noyes, an animator and father of one of his dear friends, who passed away in 2024. Invoking such personal reasonings for programming can come with suspicion about the quality of films therein, but as the dazzling, messy, and joyful Alphabet appeared, it was clear that the programming choice was one of deep necessity and love for a person whose artistic vigor Breslin said he and his friends took for granted. All three animations were a reprieve from the sometimes punishing and/or stuffy photographed films. After going to sleep and journeying through a wild ride of dreams, the noodly figure of Sandman (the film is animated with sand), wakes up out of bed and decides it needs to leave its room, perhaps for an adventure as vibrant as its sleeping visions.
More than halfway into the festival, I felt coaxed by this current of remembrance and community that ran throughout the programming. Was I starting to become indifferent about the merits of individual films? Was it enough simply to be a small node in this cinema family? Everyone seemed too happy to be together for me to imagine them really judging the films. Maybe we were all just exhausted from watching so many different films, maybe I’m just projecting. The vibrancy of celluloid contributes to an easing of the nerves as well. Seeing the first instant of warm light flooding the screen is an event in and of itself separate from the film that will ensue from it. The process lets me forget rash judgments, instead I simply and consistently give my attention. Despite this aura potentially diminishing the power of these films as their own isolated pieces, certain images and sounds remain glued in my brain. The woman in the infinite hallway of Songs Overheard in the Shadows, the square eggs of Before Need Redressed, Peter Berlin’s voice hilariously reminiscing about his youth in Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin, and the smell of burning plastic in Luis Macías’ imageless expanded cinema piece the eyes empty and the pupils burning of rage and desire are all moments within works that resist, in their singularity, the potentially overwhelming tide of the festival. Through the festival’s nonhierarchical structure, the organism functions, and viewers are allowed to simply be, ready to be surprised by programming choices and/or the films therein.
Zwillinge by Luisa Greenfield is then, for me, the small, deceptively simple nucleus which held together the entire weekend. The film uses two sequences. The first films the “Gemini” version of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Zodiac Music Boxes. The repetition of the mechanical movements within the music box contrasts the repetition of the ethereally floating tune it produces; the beauty of the song is trapped in this strange roving object. The second sequence details a synopsis of Daniéle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub’s Machorka-Muff and its exclusion from competition at the 1963 Oberhausen Short Film Festival. Through an encouraging letter written by Stockhausen to the young filmmakers after viewing the film, the two sections of Zwillinge connect and provoke innumerable questions about the stability of art’s history and the fire that ties together a constellation of artists throughout time within the degraded cultural sphere they resist. Its successful and memorable formal construction contains the ethos of film/art as an organism that the festival as a whole engendered. Now when I think again of Stockhausen’s embracing letter to Huillet & Straub, I can’t help recalling all the loving embraces of filmmakers, programmers, projectionists, attendees, and family members throughout the weekend. I’ve never been more convinced that the collective is the energy source that keeps not just art churning, but any worthwhile human endeavor.
“Before driving back to Los Angeles from the festival, I awoke in the middle of the night, my body perhaps still vibrating with the festival-organism’s energy. The room came alive, I started recording.”
Dan Ziegler is a filmmaker from Southern California.
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