Shorts Season
Deepa Dhanraj, Pedro Neves Marques, Alice Rohrwacher, Rainer Kohlberger, et al.
Watching
When there’s nothing in theaters worth leaving the house for1 and when you’re worn out from a full day of work, cooking, etc., what better than to pop on a movie under 60 minutes? It’s like TV, without all the commitment.
Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (2022)
“It looks more like meat than real meat,” a character at the start of this film says of a package of lab-grown ground beef staring at him placidly from the middle rack of his refrigerator. This Portuguese work of speculative fiction mimics reality while playing fast and loose with it; the soft light and fuzzy 16mm film stock signify something “realer” than glossy, effects-driven sci-fi at the same time that the film gestures beyond the real.
Director Pedro Neves Marques plays a (cis) gay man who receives an ovary implant in order to produce his own eggs that will then be harvested and fertilized by his partner before gestating in the body of a surrogate woman. Alongside this plotline Marques places the far less futuristic fertility struggles of a heterosexual woman, a friend of the gay couple. Her repeated failures to conceive with her own partner has left her feeling alienated, if not outright robotic. (“It’s like we’re treating my hormonal cycles like a factory,” she tells her partner after sex, “or the best times to send an email.”)
The storylines converge when she approaches the gay couple, their initial surrogate taken out by cancer, with the idea of being their new surrogate. Her proposal prompts all three of them to wonder what it would mean for their respective ideas of the family were a friend to step into this more intimate role. The movie ends here, right where a feature would begin, though not before a slow fade out to ocean waves scored to a Lana del Rey cover2. Her taste in music notwithstanding, I’m sure Sophie Lewis would have a field day with all of this.
Le Pupille (2022)
La Ricotta (1963)
Alice Rohrwacher’s Oscar-nominated short from last year reminded me of another short by her fellow countryman Pier Paolo Pasolini. Both films play around with frame rate; both entail the lust for a highly caloric treat by underclass heroes; both feature characters pantomiming scenes from the life of Christ, here at a Christmas pageant, there on a film shoot. The Pasolini is giddy with the energy of a gay Marxist in the 1960s (you even get to see the man himself bust a move in the opening credits); the Rohrwacher, set in a convent orphanage in the 1940s, boasts the related energy of children anxious to break free from the dyspeptic rule of the religious sisters watching over them. Rohrwacher made this film as part of a deal with Disney, a massive W for filmmakers everywhere who aspire to making movies driven by child logic and self-consciously lacking in tidy morals.
Molkarin [Maid Servant] (1981)
Something Like a War (1991)
Love in the Time of AIDS (2006)
The Yugantar film collective, founded in the 1980s by Abha Bhaiya, Deepa Dhanraj, Meera Rao, and Navroze Contractor, made four films about women’s labor organizing and feminist struggle in India using a combination of nonfiction and narrative techniques. The first of these, Molkarin, depicts the collective action of nearly 500 domestic workers in the city of Pune (some 150 kilometers east of Mumbai) as they organize and go on strike against stagnant, infinitesimally low wages—something like 15 rupees a month for some of the women featured.
Yugantar approaches the topic through three methods: archival photographs of the labor movement; small meetings of the movement’s leaders (in what I gather are reenactments with some creative liberties taken), where they trade stories of their working conditions and financial precarity; and a conversation among union representatives, who share with the filmmakers both their strategy for uniting the workers and also their theoretical observations about the roots of the present discontent (primary culprit: the total devaluing of women’s work). In the process of organizing for higher wages and better benefits, the women uncover still more miseries they share in common, such as the alcoholism widespread among their husbands. Though it’s too short to explore interesting tangents like these in much detail, Molkarin is illuminating for anyone interested in the workings of organized labor.
Deepa Dhanraj may be the most well-known figure from Yugantar, for having later struck out on a solo career that included 1991’s Something Like a War, an hourlong documentary about family-planning policy in India. It’s a harrowing watch that concludes unforgettably, with a woman deducing that the international development agencies pouring money into sterilization programs ostensibly to end poverty are actually just killing the poor. Dhanraj’s more recent Love in the Time of AIDS was made in part with support from the Canadian international development organization but seems to be higher on the prospects of global funding for public health campaigns. Love follows a group of kothis, femme-identifying gay men (to oversimplify; none of them refer to themselves using terms—gay, trans—that would be more familiar to, e.g., an American audience). Dhanraj interviews the kothis about their past and present experiences with sex and self-identification and intercuts their responses with scenes where they gossip, do each other’s makeup, and generally seem to be having a good time together. Alongside these, Dhanraj places scenes of the AIDS-prevention educational efforts of urban-based doctors working in both the city and the country, showing the ways they must adapt their harm-reduction messaging for both settings.
This bifurcated approach—subjects speaking for themselves on one side, medical professionals at work on the other—is also seen in Something Like a War, and in both films it serves to give a more complete environmental picture. It’s obvious that Dhanraj is a trustworthy presence on set, or else she wouldn’t have access to the intimate stories her subjects have to tell. In Something Like a War, she films a group of women swapping notes about their menstrual cycles; in Love, she shoots a workshop where the kothis roleplay a variety of sexual scenarios to arbitrate the relative risks of HIV transmission in each one. There’s a lot of queer joy on display throughout Love, which in its closing moments pivots from medical education into a dance party finale. By foregrounding how the kothis see themselves and want to be seen, it’s easy to see how Dhanraj’s film would be a useful tool for combatting their marginalization.
Emergence Collapse (2021)
Stellar (1993)
If I correctly understand the minimal information about his creative process available online, Austrian visual artist Rainer Kohlberger generates audiovisual tableaux with algorithms. Emergence Collapse, which you can watch on YouTube or Vimeo but which you should not watch if you have epilepsy, was made in partnership with Jung An Tagen, an avant-garde composer/audio technician who (according to his website) wants folks to rethink the idea of the experimental in art, “not as deviation from aesthetic orthodoxy, but as the design and implementation of compositional systems that offer unpredictable results.”
Emergence Collapse is certainly unpredictable. Looking like a series of regurgitated windows XP screensavers and sounding like a pinball machine on a bad trip, my mind instinctively tried to find other cinematic reference points: messier than the stargate scene in 2001, less elegiac than the atom bomb explosion in episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return. Out of curiosity I looked up Stan Brakhage’s Stellar to use as an additional point of comparison. The Brakhage film is an assemblage of abstractions deriving from photographed paintings. It’s decidedly more organic feeling than Emergence Collapse; I would even go so far as to say it was soothing to watch. Kohlberger’s film is an almost punishingly chaotic watch (and listen), though there are discernible moments of rising and falling action, (if you can call it that) and there is something perversely pleasurable in waiting for the screen to shift to a new set of visual noise and detritus every couple of seconds.
Unlike the AI art that’s been fooling people on Twitter with its resemblance to the real, Emergence Collapse skirts the uncanny because the computers behind it don’t seem to have been trained to imitate meaningful images or language. And in contrast to Stellar, where the resemblance of the quick montage of painted blotches to interplanetary photography is an intentional feature of the work on Brakhage’s part (thus the title), the inscrutability of the computational processes behind Emergence Collapse obstruct any free-associative search for tidy meanings therein. Taking it all in, I felt like I was observing an infant computer going to town at the arts and crafts station of the school for little robots.
TikTok of Sofia Coppola’s Daughter About to Make Dinner Because She’s Grounded (2023)
Well I’m glad she at least knows the difference between a clove of garlic and an onion now.
Note to any theater owners or distributors reading this: you can change this by bringing Pacifiction to the DMV. I guarantee you at least one (1) ticket sale.
It’s “Let Me Love You Like a Woman,” in case that means anything for anyone reading this.