by Joshua Peinado
For more than a decade, Michael Sicinski has been one of the most prominent critics of experimental and avant garde film. His writing has appeared in MUBI Notebook, Cinema Scope, Ultra Dogme, Filmmaker Magazine, and most recently, he has taken up as a staff writer for In Review Online. Through this period of time, Sicinski has remained steadfast in his championing of filmmakers both new and old, and his fifteenth program with the Houston Cinema Arts Festival—Colors Nailed to the Mast: New Experimental Cinema—reflects this, showcasing seven films from filmmakers four years into their practice to those with more than fifty years of filmmaking behind them. Though all the films are short, their lengths range from just two minutes to over twenty. The films also represent a variety of disciplines—16mm, digital, archive film, and direct animation all make appearances in the program, a testament to the possibilities of creation and curation in the avant-garde scene.
Rhayne Vermette’s A Black Screen Too (2024) functions as a sequel to Black Rectangle (2014), made more than a decade ago. In the years between the films, Vermette has been busy honing her practice, releasing her debut feature, Ste. Anne in 2021. Though her profile has grown since then, A Black Screen Too is a textured reminder of her roots as an architect. This influence is even more obvious in Black Rectangle, which uses strips of 16mm film to construct grids that resemble window shutters; the world the audience peers into is the act of creation. A Black Screen Too takes this effect and remixes it; single 16mm frames—almost all colored brilliantly—swim through the frame at lightning pace. The result feels like a storm of stained glass, which warps and deteriorates as the film goes on. This is the meat of the film, sandwiched by direct animation vis-a-vis Norman McLaren, Len Lye, or Stan Brakhage. Apparent scratches on the film stretch themselves into a grid of white lines on a black screen (reminiscent of Black Rectangle) until collapsing into individual black 16mm frames, which slowly becomes a dance of colored geometries.
A Sense of Nothing (2024) is the latest effort from Francisco Rojas, a Chilean filmmaker, critic, and programmer. Rojas’ concerns are evident from the title—it is a film of color and texture, defined by its rapid movements which obfuscate individual objects in favor of stitched-together prismatic rushes. Initially striking for its use of light and color—it’s a warm film, deep reds and oranges abound—by the end, it’s apparent that much of the film’s prowess is found in its flickering darknesses. It opens to a cycle of red before blinking, opening up its gaze to strands of yellow light jumping in and out of the frame. Rapidly moving images of the sea are crosscut with glimpses into a void. The film’s light play most immediately recalls Brakhage’s Text of Light (1974) and some strobing images of scattered tree branches across a dusky blue sky resemble scenes from Anticipation of the Night (1958), though Rojas’ sense for dynamism in his camera movements seems to mirror the fast-panning techniques of Teo Hernández.
Careless Passage (2024) is a major work from Jerome Hiler, who has helmed a series of innovative, tender, and technically unrivaled glimpses into an entirely different form of filmmaking over the course of his late career. The structure of these films magnifies their aesthetic concerns, using multiple exposures to illuminate the various dimensions of each work. In many ways, Hiler’s films feel like a return to the extravagant filmmaking of the silent period (his films are silent, after all). In layering his images, Hiler acts as an architect laying the foundations of each frame shot by shot, at times supplementing one material for another in accordance with the demands of the movement. Ornate constructions appear, built of stray lights, passageways, and textured letters. The opening scene has a remarkable depth achieved by having a background made up of two separate shots of a graffiti-covered wall, one moving back and forth while the other carefully examines its surface of speckled light which appears like snow in the night. A brilliant orange light bulb opens and dims in a corner of the frame while the blue glow of a street light is hidden by a curved iron gate in another.
The next scene brings a new element, a blurred and ever-shifting orange, which cross-cuts with quick shots of trees overlooking a pond—what these images mean in the context of each other is mystifying and enrapturing. The relation of the two establishing scenarios however, is immediately felt in the warm glow of Hiler’s impasto streaks of color across the screen. The film functions as many of Hiler’s do, with staged breaks between the individual and the collective, the prosaic and the phenomenal. One of the most compelling movements in Hiler’s filmography is found early on in the film. His camera examines a chain link fence facing a wall, moving as if guided by a current towards a division in the fence. Over the course of several takes, Hiler rocks back and forth across the gravitational center, a gentle lullaby in the context of his previous shot—a brilliant sequence of rainbow-filtered lights layered on top of the shadows of branches.
The most stunning use of Hiler’s multiple exposures begins with squares of light framing strangers’ silhouettes on the beach, the frames rotating and layering on top of each other to create unfolding geometric patterns of luminance. As the people leave the frame, a new background element enters—shadows like ripples, as if peering into a void between the spaces in a net. The blue-lit iron gate returns, this time grander,
announcing the return of many people to the beach. At the same time as this triumphant celebration, a symphony of lights twinkle across the screen like stars. As these objects move, disappear, and reappear, Hiler introduces a neon-lit clock which might as well have always been there as its emergence comes from outside the frame zooming in, its interior still hollow so as not to interrupt the ongoing action. It is an elaborate display of Hiler’s ability to play with light, movement, and depth in his cinema, followed by some simple passages. People walking in the park, pastoral shadows, the cycling of a ferris wheel. Elsewhere in the film, Hiler and his life partner, filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky take a walk through some fields. His eye takes in the beauty of both the world and his partner—Dorsky sits on a bench and walks in the shade of a tree.
Other films in the program demonstrate far more subtle uses of color—such as Anna Marziano’s Farsi seme (2024), which acts as a silent meditation on the relations between medicine and plant life. It’s a straightforwardly beautiful work, contrasting the corporeal and pastoral with precise, driving movements which act as a current undergirding its structure. It isn’t until the last act that Farsi seme clicks with the rest of the program—the film’s analogue nature acting as a canvas for a stop-motion ‘falling’ of leaves and painted film that recall the internal functions of the human body. Our Cave (2024), directed by Heehyun Choi, is shot in both black and white and color, and at the halfway point inverts both color schemes for most of the rest of the duration of the film. Zachary Epcar’s Sinking Feeling (2024) doesn’t seem to play with color so much as it does geometry and abstraction—revealing hidden worlds in office architecture and street lights. One particularly clever use of this abstraction is found in a paper shredder positioned above the camera, which gives way to a blistering, shrinking white frame.
As a small representative of the state of ‘new experimental cinema’, Sicinski’s program certainly doesn’t suffer from overextending itself, though as with any curated slate of experimental film, tastes will differ. The narratives constructed in Our Cave and Sinking Feeling feel forced when compared to the silent lyricism of Hiler or Marziano, but act well as grounding forces—especially in the context of a broad audience who may not be accustomed to the patient rhythms of avant-garde film. While not every film delivers on the promise of “colors, nailed to the mast,” they all function together as an inspired slate of the present state of experimental film, and a perceptive account of the medium’s futures.
Joshua Peinado is a filmmaker and critic based out of the Pacific Northwest, whose writing can be found most routinely in In Review Online and Screen Slate [Twitter]
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