First Look is the Museum of the Moving Image’s annual celebration of experimental cinema. This 12 months’s version options an intriguing assortment of movies that remix archival supplies, mix nonfiction and fiction, or do each. Elene Asatiani and Soso Dumbadze’s Limitation (2023) reconstructs the timeline of the 1991 coup in Georgia completely by way of discovered footage. Similarly, in Behind Closed Doors (2023), João Pedro Bim layers long-buried audio of a secret 1960s assembly of Brazil’s National Security Council over authorities propaganda from all through the years of the nation’s dictatorship. Sara Summa, her brother, and her son all play variations of themselves in her movie Arthur & Diana (2023). And Robert Kolodny takes an uncommon tack to the biopic by developing a faux interval documentary following real-life boxer Willie Pep trying to make a comeback in the 1960s in The Featherweight (2023).
One movie in the program makes notably summary use of remix. The Polish essay piece Solaris Mon Amour (2023) is a heady mash-up of Alain Resnais’s romantic drama movie Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Stanisław Lem’s landmark sci-fi novel Solaris (1961). Director Kuba Mikurda was impressed by the incontrovertible fact that Lem started writing the e book in 1959, the similar 12 months Resnais’s movie was launched. Solaris has been tailored a number of instances in lots of kinds, and is probably going acquainted to most through Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 movie, an icon of existentialism and Soviet cinema. But Mikurda invokes audio from totally different radio play variations produced by the Teatre of Polskie Radio, mixing it with footage from over 70 instructional works made by Lodz’s Educational Film Studio.
The juxtaposition of coldly scientific photos with Lem’s craving, wounded narration creates an impact just like Resnais’s movie, an enigmatic, montage-heavy rumination on postwar trauma centered on the romance between a French girl and a Japanese man who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Solaris Mon Amour as an alternative suggests the feeling of being emotionally unmoored in Eastern Europe throughout the tumultuous 20th century, of dropping one’s sense of rootedness amid an age of dizzying scientific discovery following a few of the worst carnage humankind had ever skilled.
Gasoline Rainbow (2023) has extra of a story arc holding it collectively, although it too emphasizes vibes over plot — albeit very in another way, and usually far more pleasantly. This is the newest work from director brothers Bill and Turner Ross, who specialise in establishing intricate situations that their characters navigate as they observe them. In this movie, they deal with a gaggle of teenagers who embark on an ill-planned highway journey throughout Oregon to the coast. Recent highschool grads, these children naturally have lots on their minds about the form their lives will take. The delineation between what’s constructed and what’s real feels lots clearer right here than in most of the brothers’ earlier works. (When the group hops a practice, for example, a viewer is unlikely to suppose that is an surprising improvisation.) But the children’ totally mundane, typically deeply relatable conversations and confessions makes them really feel all the extra sincere and uncooked. That sort of inventive journey completely crystallizes the ethos of First Look.
First Look 2024 continues at the Museum of the Moving Image (36-01 35th Avenue, Astoria, Queens) by way of March 17.